Innovations in survey methodology

Former Ohio State professor Jon Krosnick is developing some exciting new methods for increasing response rates and reducing costs... read more about his NSF-funded 2008 election project at http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2006/september27/krosnick-092706.html

More data for polling junkies

SurveyUSA's coverage of the Ohio gubernatorial and Senate races includes a cool tracking feature that allows users to view respondent trends broken out by a decent list of key demographic variables as well as political leanings. They have three time points thus far.

Click on the large "T" in the crosstabs to sort and view tracking data.

COPS does TOPS

This year three COPS faculty (Eveland, Hayes, & Kosicki) and some COPS graduate students are working with faculty and graduate students in the Political Science department to field The Ohio Political Survey (TOPS). This year TOPS will be a three wave panel study plus a cross-sectional study of Ohio adults. Wave I of TOPS began today. Wave II will begin in early October, and Wave III (and the cross-section) will begin the day after the election. The study will examine a number of topics related to Ohio politics and the governor/U.S. senate campaigns, including election and political scandals, opinion perceptions, political discussion networks, and new forms of political media. Look for preliminary results posted here as the data become available, and more detailed findings to be submitted to future academic conferences.

Election 2006 Polls

If you're a popular public opinion poll junkie like me, you might enjoy spending some of your "time off" as summer winds down checking out some really top-notch Web sites that are serving as clearing houses for information on how the American public's answering today's big questions.

Slate's Election Score Card
Slate follows up on their excellent 2004 poll aggregation with a pretty comprehensive look at the nation's top senate and gubernatorial races, as well as a "generic candidate" look at the house. There's also an informative "momentum shift” feature.

Pollster.com
Slate basically provides the high points from this site, but you can get more detail here. Not to mention the "Mystery Pollster" blog.

Polling Report.com
Polling Report posts frequency analyses for virtually every major, popular, public opinion poll. As a result, it's updated on almost a daily basis.

While most of these aren't very "scholarly," they might spark some research ideas, or at least help provide a feel for what the nation's saying in the here and now. I’m sure there are other great sites out there; these are just the ones that I’m currently frequenting.