Services / Perspective — Polling as Ethnography
Polling is structured listening.
At its best, a poll is a disciplined way of listening to people who’d otherwise never have the time to tell you what they think — radical openness to what they have to say about their views and their lives. We help you understand what is happening, to whom, and how you can be what they need.
The premise
Polling is applied ethnography.
Ethnography is the study of peoples as people. What is happening to someone, who they are, and how they live is usually inseparable from where they live — demography and geography can’t be pulled apart. That’s why so many of the important facts about people end up drawn as maps.
We’re a where-first polling practice: two people who are otherwise alike but live in different places lead very different lives, and we build that fact into everything we do. Our job doesn’t end when the crosstabs land — we help you make sense of what people told you, and act on it across the whole of your work.
Two lenses
The macroscopic and the microscopic.
Quantitative research describes lives at the scale of a place — “African-American voters in middle-class precincts of Houston.” Qualitative research gets close enough to hear the inflection in a voice. You need both.
Lives at the scale of a place. Aggregate precincts resolve into the geography a survey actually samples.
Close enough to see the individual. Every point is one person, in one place, with one thing to tell you.
Quantitative Research
MacroscopicA structured survey instrument, put to people in person, by post, telephone, text, email or online, over a short window. We combine your own intelligence, public research and best-in-class commercial data into a comprehensive district profile — a briefing you can actually load into statistical and geographical software — then work with top data-collection partners to field it on your timeline.
Baseline surveys
A full-depth read of starting conditions — longer by design, usually 18-20 minutes, because everything we measure later is measured against this.
Trend & tracking
Trend surveys (8-12 min) watch conditions shift; as the date nears, shorter tracking waves (5-8 min), run more often, catch volatile movement.
Spatial analysis
Voters don’t live in the cloud. We show how each answer maps to real people — where they live, where people like them live, and what that whereness does to your findings.
Advanced statistics
Geospatial variables in every analysis — plus CHAID, multivariate regression, factor analysis, or whatever the question actually calls for.
Qualitative Research
MicroscopicStructured, facilitated sessions with small groups — the work most people call focus groups. Here we’re after what large-scale surveys miss: the inflection in a voice, the body language, the whole texture of an experience. It’s how you find the perfect phrasing of an idea, or confirm that the message people hear is the one you meant to send.
On sensitive issues it’s tempting to lead the room. Do that and the research is worthless — so we don’t, at all.
We value radical openness and honesty, and every one of us has decades of experience in facilitation. You can trust what we bring back.
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