Similar to any other reporting, understanding the motivations, interests and goals of those you are gathering information from helps in evaluating the legitimacy and trustworthiness of the information. Therefore, understanding why somebody would pay for a poll to be conducted may help in establishing your confidence about the overall credibility and value of the results.

Many different organizations sponsor and pay for polls to be conducted. Often sponsoring organizations will fall into one of seven types:

1. Academic institutions

2. Federal, State and Local Governments

3. Media Organizations

4. Non-profit groups or Foundations

5. Special interest groups

6. Businesses and Corporations

7. Political campaigns, consultants, and candidates

Generally, the first three types have explicitly stated positions of undertaking neutral and unbiased projects. Although that does not mean you can just take their work at face value, you must still run through the check list of key questions and be sure you are satisfied with how they conducted the project and asked the questions. The last type – political campaigns, consultants, and candidates - will almost always be working on behalf of a “side.” In these cases, you may find that the questions or the way of conducting the project, while serving as a very useful tool for the campaign, may not be suitable for providing an objective viewpoint of the issue at hand.

Therefore, the trickiest groups in terms of assessing motivation will be with non-profits, Foundations, special interest groups, and corporations. In many cases, these groups will be conducting unbiased and credible research projects even if they have a stated interest in the topic. But, in some cases, the organizations position on a given issue or their own self-interests may introduce some type of bias into a polling project. Asking these sponsors to explain why they did the project and your own analysis of the questionnaire and the findings will help you to decide whether the results and their conclusions are legitimate.

Similarly, many organizations pay for, design, conduct the interviews and analyze the results themselves. For example, some universities have their own survey research centers, as do some media organizations. But, in other cases a sponsor will contract with a company to collect the interviews on their behalf with the sponsor having varying levels of involvement in the design and analysis. Sometimes the sponsor does everything except collect the actual data, sometimes the contracted company does just about everything on the project. Many of these data collection organizations have a great deal of experience in survey research, but some do not. Again, asking about the firm’s previous experience is crucial. Also, many reputable firms are members of key survey professional organizations such as AAPOR, and you may find them listed at one of following sites:

National Council on Public Polls

Council of American Survey Research Organizations