NEWS ORGANIZATIONS HAVE LONG USED public opinion polling to gauge who’s ahead in a campaign. The polls are popular with readers and viewers, who are intrigued by what other people think. And polls are popular with journalists — they offer hard numbers that reporters are comfortable using.

Although political candidates have been using polling for years to

determine the mood of voters, newsrooms were slow to follow. Only recently have newsrooms begun to use surveys extensively to determine which issues matter most to citizens, and to use that information to shape campaign coverage.

A poll, if properly drawn and conducted, can provide an accurate indication of where the public stands on specific issues at any given time. That information then can be used as a starting point for editors and reporters in thinking through issues-based campaign coverage.

Other approaches give you more depth of understanding as you seek to learn from citizens. Focus groups and even extended interviews can provide a window into the concerns and the thinking of citizens in your community, which will inform and enrich your reporting.

Issues Polls

Many newsrooms now use polling to find out what people care about most. Citizens are asked to rate the importance of specific issues or to identify (in open-ended questions) the biggest problems facing the city, state, or nation. Sometimes people are asked to choose between competing issues or values, for example, whether available tax dollars should be spent on education or to build more prisons.

Why Conduct Issues Polls?

Editors and news directors not only want to know the half-dozen or so most important issues, they want to know what the citizens’ priorities are. If possible, they also want to know about deeply held concerns of small groups within the population. All this requires more questions and takes more time, making this kind of survey more difficult to complete — and thus more expensive than a horse-race kind of poll.

What the issues poll provides in return is substantive data on how citizens weigh the various issues. While the poll still captures public opinion at a point in time, the findings are less volatile because they measure concerns and underlying attitudes, which are more stable than political opinion.

News organizations that have done follow-up surveys find people remain concerned about the same issues during the course of the campaign, although the rankings may shift, and their thinking about solutions may change as a result of candidate and citizen discussion.

And new issues can surface. Editors guiding issues-based coverage need to remain flexible to breaking issues.

How to Conduct Issues Polls

• Whom to survey. Most news organizations doing issues polling seek to develop information on how citizens feel, so they survey the entire voting age population that can be reached by phone.

• Sample size. The size of the sample can vary, from a low of 400 to a high of 2,000, depending on the sophistication of the information sought and the funds available.

• Types of questions. Most surveys combine several different types of questions to gain both a breadth and depth of understanding.

A weakness of this approach is that some issues that do matter to people may not surface because they were not included on the pre-set list.

Making a choice. This approach asks respondents to select from a list of choices. For example: "In your opinion, which of the following issues should be the next governor’s top priority?" This kind of question can be used only if the list is short — three or four options at most — which means it cannot include a wide range of options.

Open ended. These questions allow citizens to come up with an unprompted answer rather than choosing from a pre-set list. An example: "What one issue affecting [the state/the country] concerns you most?" These kinds of questions are frequently asked at the start or the end of a poll to identify issues that may not have surfaced in preparing the questionnaire.

The Oregonian’s 1996 issues poll also gave people a chance to explain their concerns by asking a follow-up question: What solutions would you propose? Those answers provided a deeper understanding of what people really meant, and offered a way to compare citizens’ expectations with candidates’ promises.

The North Carolina "Your Voice, Your Vote" surveys in 1996 and 1998 started off with open-ended questions, then asked respondents to rank a list of issues. There were some small differences in the ranking of the issues within each set of responses, but being able to consider both helped the editors select the issues to focus on in their coverage.

A drawback of the open-ended approach is that it takes more time, both in asking the questions and analyzing the answers, and therefore drives up the cost of the poll. It is not a cost-effective way to develop a range of concerns.

Cost of Issues Polls

As a rule of thumb, it will cost $30 per interview to hire a professional polling firm. That means a 400 interview sample will cost about $12,000. But, in fact, costs can vary widely based on a number of factors.

• The length and complexity of the questionnaire. The more information sought, and the more complex the questions, the longer it takes to complete an interview. It also means some people will hang up on the interviewers, forcing them to start over with someone else. That takes more time. And time costs money. Polling firms will also charge for the added time it takes to develop the more sophisticated questionnaire.

• The size of the sample. The extra hours needed for the survey-taker to complete the additional interviews in a larger sample is a direct added cost.

• Screening for subgroups. It takes more time to fine-tune a sample for sub-categories, such as political party if polling is being done for a primary, or among only registered voters; or to make sure there is a representative number of minorities, who can be hard to reach by telephone. Again, this costs more.

• Who does the survey. An established polling firm will almost certainly cost more. And it’s important to know who the firm’s clients are before signing on. Still, a firm that has done work in the political arena can help devise a very effective issues survey.

• Some ways to save. Some newsrooms have developed sufficient in-house expertise to manage their own polling, using reporters who have studied survey research to draft questionnaires and write the computer programs to analyze the data. Phone numbers for random sampling can be purchased from a number of firms. And it’s also possible to contract for just the fieldwork — the actual telephoning. This could bring outside costs to under $10 per interview.

Some newsrooms also have partnered with area universities in polling projects, with faculty helping to draw the questionnaires and samples and students doing field work. The market research department at an individual news organization may be able to help find ways to cut costs — such as getting a better price by using a firm with which it regularly does business.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are nothing more than conversations with people —

focused, directed, but still conversations. Where polls provide a shallow look at the opinions of the broad population, focus groups provide a deep look at how a slice of the population thinks about an issue. They can be used to provide information at several different times during your campaign coverage.

Why Use Focus Groups?

• Pre-poll. Focus groups can be used to test how people feel about local, state, or national problems before drawing the questionnaire for a poll. The discussions can bring to the surface issues that haven’t been on the political horizon. They will often highlight competing desires — lower taxes and better education — that need to be tested in the questionnaire. The discussions can suggest ways to ask, or not to ask, questions, and flag words to avoid because they have one meaning in the political realm, another to citizens.

• Post-poll. Focus groups are sometimes convened to follow up on the issues and discuss them in more detail, to get at why people feel as they do. They can be used to let citizens discuss, even deliberate on, issues on which there is a deep split within the community, or to try reconciling competing positions. Often, these have been used to gather material for issues stories or video for special TV reports.

How to Convene a Focus Group

• Getting started. It’s not a magical process, but there can be problems in getting started. The logistics of bringing a group of people together, arranging a meeting place, and so on, are foreign to many news people. In Boston, for example, attendance at one of the sessions was so low it failed to be representative of anything. Some newsrooms have found that professional help is valuable. There may also be someone elsewhere in the news organization with experience in convening a group.

• Whom to include. Focus groups should involve between eight and 12 people, enough to provide for a varied discussion but not so many that some people don’t get a chance to participate fully. Groups should comprise a reasonable cross section of the community — mixing age, gender, race, and demographic diversity — or they should be specifically targeted. If the plan is to conduct a number of focus-group conversations, a technique called "cluster sampling" can be used. In this case, each group is selected precisely because it represents a different element of a diverse community.

-- Reprinted from the Poynter Election Handbook: A Guide to Campaign Coverage.