Public Opinion Polling Basics | Pew Research Center

Hello! I’m Scott Keeter, senior survey advisor at Pew Research Center. I’ve been conducting surveys of all kinds for about 40 years. Currently I work with our survey methodology team, which provides methodological guidance and support to all the Center’s research teams. 

Most of the work we do at the Center involves opinion polling. So let’s take a step back and ask a few basic questions about this frequently misunderstood field:

For centuries, scholars have debated the question: “What is public opinion?” Or, put differently, “What is the will of the people?” And for nearly as long, they have debated how best to measure it. The great political scientist V.O. Key Jr. defined public opinion as “those opinions held by private persons which governments find it prudent to heed.” And while there have been many ways of assessing and measuring these “opinions held by private persons” across the ages, by far the most common approach today is the opinion poll. 

The typical opinion poll consists of a set of “interviews” with people selected to be representative of a population of interest, such as all U.S. adults. These aren’t like the anxiety-inducing interviews you might have for a job. In survey interviews, a pollster will ask everyone the same set of questions in the same way, then tally up the answers and report the results.

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