Not that long ago, with the advent of touch-tone dialing, TV news directors routinely took the pulse of the community by asking a question and directing callers to specific telephone numbers that recorded their response.
Watching the results tallied on screen just before a commercial break soon became a fixture of local newscasts. The results didn’t come close to being scientific, and the questions weren’t particularly chosen for their impact on public policy, but you could get at least some sense of how strongly people felt about the topic of the day.
Newspapers took a different, more laborious route. They began commissioning real, live public opinion polls — with scientifically valid questions and responses taken from a random telephone sample of the market. The results could be broken down in subsets for categories such as geography, income and race. Polling topics varied from whom likely voters preferred in the governor’s race to whether we like our tea to come to the table sweet or unsweet.
Now, with the proliferation of home computers, e-mail and the Internet, this newspaper and its online edition, ajc.com, are about to enter a whole new world of community opinion surveying.
Through a survey we are calling Voice of Atlanta, metro residents soon will have a new way to participate in and influence the debate on issues of community interest. Participants who volunteer for this online panel will be queried by e-mail to give their views on issues that will shape the future of the region, and on things that just happen to be what everybody’s talking about today. The surveys will be conducted by the Journal-Constitution, ajc.com and THINKologies, a local firm that specializes in electronic relationships solutions.
But unlike the instant telephone surveys of the past, Voice of Atlanta will be a more scientifically valid response to the issues and topics of the day. We’ll know a little something about everyone who responds and we’ll be able to go deeper into their feelings on the topic. In many cases — like the full-fledged polling we do — we’ll be able to break down the responses and compare the results by geography or sex or age groups. And we’ll be able to publish the results quickly.
It works like this: Through the home page of ajc.com, the newspaper is inviting people to join Voice of Atlanta. After collecting the e-mail addresses of those who volunteer, THINKologies asks them to fill out a panelist questionnaire via an Internet link. In its first three weeks of soliciting for panelists, ajc.com has already received nearly 1,000 volunteers.
The goal is eventually to recruit a pool of 5,000 metro Atlantans who come as close as possible to reflecting the demographic diversity of the area. Members of this pool would then be selected to answer e-mail questions that provide their opinions on topics close to home. We expect to survey on some topic once a month or so; perhaps more often as we and the panelists get a better feel for how it will work.
Not every panelist would be selected for every survey — we wouldn’t want to wear them out giving their opinions. And sometimes we may want to survey a specific segment of the pool — 18- to 25-year-olds, for instance — for something near and dear to their lives.
Just how valid Voice of Atlanta will be in representing the true feelings of the community at large is still a subject of some debate among pollsters and public opinion experts. Online surveying hasn’t been time tested the way random-selection telephone surveying has. Opinion researchers are always more leery of responses from survey participants who are “self-selected” — meaning they volunteer to express their opinion rather than being chosen at random. So we realize its limitations.
Plus, we have no plans to abandon our routine use of political polling and issues surveys, such as the recently completed Metro Poll, which showed that 76 percent of metro Atlantans use the Internet and 72 percent use e-mail at home or at work — a techno-savvy population base that is perfect for this new format.
We expect Voice of Atlanta to become a useful tool in providing reader feedback and help the newspaper provide yet another outlet for readers to share their opinions with each other and with community leaders. The first topics for discussion will go out to the panelists who have signed up later this summer.
Stay tuned in print and online for the results.
