There is a divisive issue in the township where I work. There is talk of doing a survey to determine the public opinion on it. A survey on a somewhat related topic was done in the past; however, it was an in-house operation and I question the ability of those who did it and the validity of their results.
Question: Anybody know about how much it would cost to have a non-partisan polling firm or market research firm to do it? Obviously there’ll be lots of variables, but can you get within an order of magnitude, maybe? A few thousand dollars? A few tens of thousands? Over a hundred thousand dollars?
Curiously yours,
js_I want to give you a good polling_africanus.
I use a firm in Colorado Springs for such things. If done by phone it’s generally about 3-5 dollars per completed call.
Call your state university. A lot of them have researchers who do polling either as part of their own research or as a semi-public entity within the university. The price will be a little (but not a lot) less than a private firm, and you’ll be able to deflect charges that it’s a “partisan” pollster.
The big problem I’ve seen with pollsters is not their ability to do the poll, but to write the questions. It’s very difficult to construct a thorough survey that can’t be accused of leading the respondent to a desired answer. The best solution is to have someone (smart) from each side vette the questions before the first call is ever made.
Also, be vigilant in keeping the survey short. Once you start planning a survey, everyone wants to add questions and the thing gets out of hand.
I used to work for a nationally respected telephone surveying company. Cost depended on the size of the project and some other variables, but as a rough ballpark estimate, we charged about one dollar per question per respondant for a close-ended (multiple choice) question, and about five dollars per question per respondant for an open-ended question that required our interviewers to record the person’s response verbatim.