Polls (Quantitative Research)

VRC cre­ates, designs and ana­lyzes sur­vey projects that are admin­is­tered by tele­phone, mobile phone, mail, in-person inter­views, or online inter­views. We start by help­ing you develop tar­geted research goals from which we con­struct the best pos­si­ble sam­pling method­ol­ogy. We guide you on how to make tough choices about which ques­tions to include and which to cut, in order to meet your project’s goals while stay­ing within its budget.

Mod­el­ing

We have extensive expe­ri­ence in using multi-variate analy­sis such as mul­ti­ple regres­sion analy­sis, clus­ter analy­sis, and CHAID to develop mod­els of voter behav­ior and donor behav­ior. We also have imple­mented a vari­ety of micro-targeting plans. VRC is pre­pared to develop mod­els as needed by the client, or to review the mod­el­ing pro­pos­als of other con­sul­tants, keep­ing a sharp eye on the cost-benefits ratio of such projects.

Wire­less (Cell Phone) Interviewing

As of June 2013, more than 2 in 5 (39.4%) Amer­i­can homes had only wire­less tele­phones, and an addi­tional 15.7% report hav­ing a land­line yet receiv­ing all or vir­tu­ally all of their calls on a wire­less phone. (CDC Wireless Substitution Survey) That means nearly half of all Amer­i­cans are receiv­ing most of the calls via cell phones, and these num­bers are grow­ing by 2–5% every year. Every tele­phone inter­view­ing project should at least include a dis­cus­sion of whether or not it is fea­si­ble and afford­able to include wire­less inter­views. Donna Vic­to­ria con­ducted her first projects includ­ing wire­less num­bers in 2006, and has devel­oped a num­ber solu­tions to make the wire­less sam­ple frame fit into her clients’ needs.

• RDD (ran­dom digit dial­ing)  sam­ples are one way to incor­po­rate cell phones at a higher rate. These sam­ples tend to cost more due to the added sam­ple cost and increased bur­den on callers, they also lack added data most voter files con­tain. How­ever, when a large num­ber of cell phones are needed, this is often the best option.
• Voter files are also increas­ingly con­tain­ing a more rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of cell-phone users, espe­cially as peo­ple become more accus­tomed to list­ing their cell phone as their pri­mary num­ber. If the voter file already con­tains a fair num­ber of cell phones, we can eas­ily  over­sam­ple them to achieve the pre­ferred per­cent­age of cell phone respondents.
• If the voter file does not con­tain a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sam­ple of cell phone users, one option before turn­ing to an RDD sam­ple is to run the sam­ple through a trusted ven­dor and have the sam­ple remarked for cell phone num­bers. We have noticed that many voter files do not put an empha­sis on mark­ing cell phones, so this has proven to be one of the most effec­tive and cost-effective strate­gies available.

Give us a call; this area of research evolves too rapidly to ignore. CONTACT > 

Standage Market Research

Donna Victoria has been using Standage Market Research since 1989. In 2012, after 23 years of having the vast majority of her calling done at Standage, she acquired the phone bank after the passing of its original owner, Ruby Standage. Owning her own phone bank allows Donna Victoria a degree of flexibility that most other pollster are unable to match, as well as unparalleled quality control over her surveys from beginning to end.