What Survey Researchers Can Learn from the 2016 U.S. Pre-Election Polls: How to Fine-Tune Survey Methods and Restore Credibility

This article examines what went wrong with pre-election polls for the 2016 U.S. presidential election and offers solutions to restore credibility to survey methods.
Terhanian

What Survey Researchers Can Learn from the 2016 U.S. Pre-Election Polls: How to Fine-Tune Survey Methods and Restore Credibility

George Terhanian

The NPD Group, Port Washington, NY

Editors' Note:

George Terhanian played a lead role in the design of the Advertising Research Foundation’s groundbreaking study—Foundations of Quality 2 (FoQ 2)—from 2010 to 2015. Its goal: to explore and potentially identify practices, methodologies, and technologies to improve the accuracy of online survey research. Terhanian was the lead author on this journal’s last excerpt from the FoQ 2 series, “A Process for Developing an Optimal Model for Reducing Bias in Nonprobability Samples” (Terhanian,...

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