Polling in General

How do I sign up to receive the results of your polls?

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How can polls be so accurate when you only ask such a small number of people?

They can be accurate by the same logic which allows doctors to draw medical conclusions based on a few drops of blood. Statistical theory shows that, if one repeatedly draws samples from the same population, the variability of results based on those samples will depend on the sample size. The larger the sample size, the less different each sample will be from the others. Thus, by choosing a sample size, we can determine the range of possible population values with a specified degree of certainty.

IBOPE Inteligência has years of experience in these areas and works within generally accepted statistical parameters to ensure that we poll a truly random sample of the population. We then apply weights, if necessary, to balance the results among the various demographic categories such as age or gender.

What is a "margin of error"?

The margin of sampling error (MOE) means that if the same poll were conducted 100 times it would yield the same results – plus or minus a certain percentage – in 95 cases out of 100. For example, a sample of 400 American voters has an MOE of +/-5%, 600 has +/-4%, and 1,000 has +/-3%.

I've heard so many conflicting stories - is IBOPE Inteligência a Republican, Democratic or Independent polling and market research company?

IBOPE Inteligência is an independent and nonpartisan polling company.

Telephone Polling

Why don't you ever call me or my friends? None of my friends, or people I talk to agree with the polls!

Phone numbers are chosen purely by random with every household in the target audience having the same chance of being selected as any other household in the target audience. With tens of millions of adults in the United States, it is not uncommon that a person or their friends have not been contacted.

How can a telephone survey take into account cell phone only households?

The increase in cell phone only households has presented a serious challenge to the coverage that can be obtained using traditional techniques such as Random Digit Dialing (RDD), while dual-mode (cell-phone and landline) approaches are complicated and costly. 

At IBOPE Inteligência we address these problems in two ways: by using our interactive methodology and by employing address-based sampling.

Address based sampling (ABS) is an emerging methodology that uses the US Postal Service’s Delivery Sequence File (DSF), a database of over 135 million addresses and considered to cover at least 98% of all households in the US. All residential addresses in the sample frame are classified into a variety of categories that can be selected or de-selected on a customized basis for each individual project. Telephone number matching can then be utilized to generate an appropriate sample of phone numbers, or a random sample can be drawn and approached in the first instance by mail.

Interactive (Online) Polling

How do I sign up to be a member of your interactive panel?

Interested persons can sign up to be a member of our interactive panel here.

What would I have to do as a panelist?

• Panelists cannot choose the polls they will answer or ask to participate in specific surveys. They are randomly selected to receive an invitation from the IBOPE Inteligência database, based on the demographics needed for each individual survey. They are subsequently sent an email inviting them to respond to the poll.
• As a security measure, each email is uniquely linked to each particular panelist, so it cannot be transferred, nor can it be used more than once.
• Panelists do not know when they are going to get an invitation to take part in a survey, or what the subject matter will be, until they click on the invitation link in their email.
• The survey is active on secure servers until such time as it is deemed that the appropriate number of respondents has completed the survey to fulfill the requirements of that particular polling project.
• Once the desired number of panelists has completed a survey, IBOPE Inteligência technicians process the results, weighting each poll according to standard practices, in order to reflect the demographics of the population that each particular survey is designed to measure.