Opinion Polling

Constituency Polling

For constituency surveys where more than basic first preference analysis is required we recommend a face to face approach in order to use a ballot paper approach. The ballot paper approach allows us to count votes as they would be in an actual election and provide detailed transfer analysis.

While this means we cannot use our preferred telephone approach to the survey we do still continue to use our specific analysis techniques to ensure a representative sample. These include:-

1. Careful question wording
2. Weighting by past voting
3. Analysing by those likely to vote
4. Adjusting for refusers/Don’t Knows

International guidelines for polling recommend that any published local constituency opinion poll should be conducted on a sample size of at least 500 interviews, and this is the sample we recommend for constituency surveys.

This sample will provide a margin of error of 4.5% at 95% confidence, and is an accepted sample size for polls which are conducted in areas smaller than the total population.

The sample points for the survey are selected to be representative of the constituency at DED level. Interviews are given demographic quotas to achieve a set number of interviews within each selected DED, and therefore be representative of the constituency as a whole.

Quotas are then be set based on the known population characteristics within each of the five areas of the constituency, in terms of gender, age and social class; and the results are finally be weighted back to known population characteristics to ensure it is entirely representative of the voting population.

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