Online Public Opinion Poll Sources
- Field Poll Archives. See also Field (California) Polls (UC San Diego), which is searchable for the dates it includes.
- Roper Public Opinion Center. One of the largest archives of poll data. California State University students and faculty have subscription access to the Roper Center data. (A list of other member institutions with such access is online).
- Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey includes survey highlights for Los Angeles (PDF; free Adobe Reader available) and other areas.
- Los Angeles Times Polls. Most of the Times Poll data can be located in the newspaper's articles, which are searchable via Newspaper databases. The full question wording and a description of the survey methodology for some older polls is included via the Stat Sheets Archive.
- Public Agenda Online
- PollingReport.com
- Washington Post Opinion Polls and Surveys
- CBS News Polls
- Pew Research Center. Several of this organization's projects, such as Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, regularly conduct public opinion polls and make results available online.
- Odum Archive includes the Odum Public Opinion Data. (Odum Institute)
- American National Election Studies. Includes The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior. Public opinion and electoral behavior in American politics since 1948.
- Huffpost Pollster tracks and analyses political polls on presidential, congressional, and gubernatorial races, with links out to other polls.
- Kaiser Polls (Kaiser Family Foundation). Public opinion on health care issues.
Finding More Online Public Opinion Poll Sources
The online sources this page emphasizes offer free access to public opinion poll data to help students find poll data on specific topics and to assist those studying question design. How do you find more web sites like these?
- National Council on Public Polls is an association of polling organizations; consult their list of members. (Some charge a fee or require a subscription for access to data).
- Use an internet search engine such as Google; search for "public opinion polls".
- Local polls can be sponsored by community organizations. If you find the name of a sponsoring organization (or that of the organization that actually conducted the survey) mentioned in a newspaper article or other secondary source, you may be able to find more complete results through the organization that sponsored the poll. As an example, the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley sponsored several surveys of San Fernando Valley residents. While some of the results were in local newspapers, there is more data available as part of the Economic Alliance of the San Fernando Valley Virtual Library.
Newspaper Databases
In addition, you can find opinion polls in newspapers, many of which are available via subscription databases. Oviatt Library offers California State University, Northridge students, faculty, and staff online access to full-text newspapers via the Lexis-Nexis' Academic, Proquest Newspapers, and Ethnic Newswatch and Ethnic Newswatch: A History databases. Remember that many public opinion polls and/or surveys are paid for by various news agencies--newspapers or television, so it should not be a surprise when the information ends up included in news articles. The Historical Newspapers section of Databases by Subject: News + Current Issues lists full-text online older newspapers--such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers Los Angeles Times and ProQuest Historical Newspapers New York Times--that are available for California State University, Northridge students, faculty, and staff to use when older poll data is needed.
Print Sources of Public Opinion Polls
Use the Library Catalog to find print sources. Books on the subject are listed under "Public Opinion Polls", which is subdivided by geographic area. Some studies of social attitudes are listed under "Social Surveys" or "Public Opinion--[place]--Statistics", which are subdivided by geographic area. Examples include:
- Gallup Poll and Gallup Poll Briefing. Oviatt Library owns print copy from 1935 to 2008.
- American Attitudes: Who Thinks what About the Issues That Shape Our Lives. Each table of data includes the source of the data, i.e., which organization did the opinion poll.
Some periodicals also include public opinion polls and discuss poll results. Examples include:
National Journal and Public Opinion Quarterly.
Created by Mary M. Finley