Society

Right Track or Wrong Track? How Countries Measure Public Confidence

A right track survey measures whether respondents believe their country is moving in a positive or negative direction according to a specific survey methodolog…

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SAMPLING ARRIVES

George Gallup Applies Statistical Sampling to National Opinion

George Gallup founded the American Institute of Public Opinion in 1935, applying statistical sampling to national opinion measurement. The claim was counter-intuitive at…

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VOLUME LOSES

A Small Sample Outperforms a 2.4-Million-Reply Mail Poll

A large-circulation magazine ran a mail poll drawing roughly 2.4 million returns and predicted the wrong winner, while a far smaller sample predicted correctly. The mail…

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PROBABILITY SAMPLING

A High-Profile Miss Pushes Polling Towards Probability Designs

A well-known US polling miss in 1948 embarrassed an industry that had claimed scientific status. Post-mortems blamed quota sampling, in which interviewers chose responde…

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EUROBAROMETER

First Official Wave Across Nine European Countries

After a 1973 European Parliament report and three pilot studies, the first official Eurobarometer survey was conducted in 1974 across the nine member states of the Europ…

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WORLD VALUES SURVEY

Ronald Inglehart Launches Global Value Measurement

Political scientist Ronald Inglehart founded the World Values Survey in 1981, extending the European Values Study globally. The first wave ran from 1981 to 1984 across m…

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GALLUP WORLD POLL

Continuous Measurement Reaches More Than 160 Countries

Gallup launched the World Poll in 2005, since conducted in more than 160 countries covering an estimated 99% of the world's adult population. Samples are probability-bas…

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CONFIDENCE DOES NOT RETURN

Trust Falls in the Financial Crisis and Stays Down

Confidence and institutional trust fell sharply in many affected countries after the global financial crisis. In several of them the measures did not return to pre-crisi…

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RECENT SURVEY FINDINGS

OECD and Pew Publish Their Latest Cross-National Results

The OECD published 2024 results from its second Trust Survey, fielded in late 2023 with close to 60,000 responses across 30 countries: average trust in national governme…

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LATEST READINGS

Monthly Tracking Continues Across Thirty Countries

Ipsos continued its monthly What Worries the World programme through 2026, fielding in 30 countries among roughly 20,000 adults per wave. The 30-country average saying t…

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