This will give you some idea of why our polling is so insightful

Dear ,

It's less than a week until our polling seminar, and I thought I'd give you an idea of why our polling is worth understanding.

(If you don't have time to read more, and have already decided to come, then please just click here. The seminar is next Wednesday, 6:00 pm for 6:30 pm at 3 Edward Street, Brisbane.)

I will be analysing two polls, one conducted in January and one in July, which produced a total of 1,467 responses. Around 250 people completed both surveys, while the remainder completed one or the other.

These people volunteer their time and come from all political persuasions. They are willing to do that because they trust the analysis and know I will report the results back to them, as well as publicly. The results have also been used in academic research and underpin political analysis I publish in the media.

On average, a respondent takes around 28 minutes to complete a survey. That means those 1,467 responses represent about 677 hours of people's time, or 85 eight-hour working days.

During that time, respondents wrote the equivalent of four decent-sized novels.

That's a lot of data.

The trick is having techniques for analysing that much information. Once you do, it allows you to answer the question conventional polling generally can't: not just what voters think, but why they think it.

Quantitative polling, which is what most mainstream pollsters such as Newspoll, RedBridge, Morgan and YouGov do, is very good at telling you what. With repeated surveys it can also show how the what changes over time.

What it struggles to tell you is why.

Part of the problem is question design. If a pollster wants to know which issues voters care about, they normally decide in advance which issues to put on the list and then ask respondents to rank or rate them. Before a single answer has been given, the researcher has already decided what is worth asking about.

Our approach is different.

Apart from quantitative questions such as "Who would you vote for?", which allow us to identify where respondents are coming from politically, our questions are open.

Instead of giving respondents a list of issues that we think are important, we let them tell us what is important to them, in their own words.

Qualitative research normally has a serious limitation: the samples are too small to provide meaningful quantitative results. Our surveys are unusual because the samples are large enough that we can also extract quantitative information from the qualitative responses. It isn't exact in the way a properly weighted representative poll is, but it is certainly indicative.

That combination gives us something conventional polling cannot easily provide: a much richer picture of what voters are thinking, why they are thinking it, and how those attitudes differ across political groups.

And some of those insights have real political consequences.

Next Wednesday I'll show you what those 677 hours of responses tell us about not just how Australians intend to vote, but why.

To book, click here.

Kind regards,

GRAHAM YOUNG
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE FOR PROGRESS