The Polls--Trends: Trends In Surveys On Surveys

Despite great concern over declining rates of survey cooperation, few polling organizations collect trend data on possible causes of its decline. We gather these data in order to examine the causes of declining survey cooperation, such as confidentiality and privacy concerns, the rise of telemarketers, popular understanding of survey accuracy, biases of polling organizations, and attitudes toward the societal benefits of survey research. Although the proportion of people who have participated in at least one survey has increased, knowledge of sampling procedures has not. Meanwhile, a wide variety of attitudes toward polling have grown more negative. In 2006, pollsters fell in measures of trust in occupational categories to levels similar to members of Congress and union leaders. Overall, there has been a markedly negative shift in attitudes toward public opinion researchers and polls across several dimensions between the mid-1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.