PROSPECTUS - The Pew Charitable Trusts

16
Information Initiatives
In 1916, the venerable Literary Digest sent out millions of
postcards asking Americans to express their preferences in the
upcoming presidential race.
It was the first known example of
public opinion polling on a national
level, and it allowed the magazine to
correctly predict Woodrow Wilson’s
re-election that year and the winners
of the four elections that followed.
Alas, the Digest’s winning streak
ended spectacularly in 1936 when,
relying on more than two million
returned postcards, it asserted that
Alf Landon would handily defeat
Franklin D. Roosevelt. It turned out
that the Digest’s approach was
fatally flawed. Its list of postcard
recipients—Depression-era Americans
with telephones and cars—was
biased in favor of the affluent. In
that same election a young ad man
named George Gallup conducted a
more scientific survey of a representative
sample of 50,000 Americans
and correctly predicted Roosevelt’s
landslide victory. The era of modern
polling was launched.
Like Gallup back in 1936, the Pew
Research Center, a nonpartisan “fact
tank” that is one of America’s
premier polling organizations, still
relies on face-to-face interviews for
its Global Attitudes studies in much
of the developing world. But in the
United States the norm has long
been to survey people at random by
telephone. What was new last year
is that a significant proportion of
interviewees—particularly the young
and the mobile—were reached on
their cell phones. In its final survey
on the eve of the 2008 presidential
election—based on a combination
of 2,551 landline and 851 cell-phone
interviews—the Pew Research Center
correctly forecast Barack Obama’s
six-point victory over John McCain. It
was the second straight presidential
election in which the Pew Research
Center predicted not only the winner,
but also the exact margin of victory.
Predicting the outcome of a presidential
election two days before
the voters weigh in is an exercise of
limited value in its own right. But preelection
polls amount to a crucial final
exam for polling organizations—a
straightforward way to assess whether
“scientific” surveys of tiny percentages
of the population are indeed an
accurate reflection of public opinion.
In acing the test once again, the Pew
Research Center added to the credibility
of the many surveys it conducts
each year that cannot be validated in
such a direct fashion.
The nature and complexity of those
surveys vary widely. In 2008 the Pew
Research Center’s Forum on Religion
& Public Life released the results of
a mammoth 35,000-person survey of
Americans’ religious practices and
beliefs. Serving as a de facto religion
census—the official U.S. census does
not include any questions about matters
of faith—the forum’s U.S. Religious
Landscape Survey found that
religious affiliation in this country is
both very diverse and extremely fluid:
More than one in four Americans are
no longer affiliated with the faith in
which they were born.