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Q&A: The Gallup Poll of Baghdad

As Gallup's director of international polling, Richard Burkholder oversaw Gallup's landmark poll of Baghdad residents in late August and early September 2003. Below are some questions Tuesday Briefing editor Heather Mason asked Burkholder about the administration of the survey, along with his responses.

Q: Given the obvious infrastructure problems in Baghdad today, how did you interview a representative sample of Baghdad residents?

A: We conducted this survey using the same methodology that Gallup used for all of its public opinion polling up until just a few decades ago -- interviewing people in the privacy of their own homes, using a strict, pure-probability sample.

We started with the assumption that there would be no infrastructure to work with in Baghdad -- no trained interviewers, no census statistics to determine population distribution, etc. -- and that we would have to construct everything from scratch. In many respects, that was essentially the case, although in other respects we had more assets available than we had hoped for.

We had little information on the distribution of the population, so we used high-resolution satellite imagery that could tell us what the population density of different parts of the Baghdad metropolitan area was, and subsequently help us to determine how many interviews to conduct in each neighborhood. However, after extensive efforts on the ground in Baghdad, we were able to obtain detailed population data that survived the bombing and the destruction of the Iraqi Ministry of Planning. This information provided helpful data on population figures for more than 700 districts and subdistricts in Baghdad.

Instead of bringing in interviewers from Jordan to administer the interviews (as we had originally planned), we were able to hire a number of outstanding individuals from the Central Statistics Office who had been trained before the invasion in collecting information on consumer purchasing and consumption patterns. Obviously, these interviewers were not trained specifically in public opinion research, but they knew the Baghdad neighborhoods well, and were more likely than Jordanian interviewers to be trusted by the survey respondents. These interviewers worked under the direct supervision of our experienced team of field supervisors.

Field supervision was conducted by the same highly experienced executives -- Jihad Fakhreddine and Bassam Khalifa -- who served as field supervisors for Gallup's 2002 Poll of the Islamic World. Fakhreddine and Khalifa are employed by the Pan Arab Research Center, based in Dubai.

Q: What kind of specific challenges did you face when interviewing women?

Iraq has historically been a secular state, so we did not face the same challenges interviewing women in Baghdad that we faced, for example, in Saudi Arabia during our 2001-2002 survey. Our interviewing team in Baghdad was comprised of roughly equal numbers of men and women, but it wasn't necessary to require men to interview only men and women to interview only women. If survey respondents preferred one gender or the other, we could accommodate that, but that situation did not arise often.

The fact that all of our interviews were conducted in people's homes was a great advantage -- both for the reliability of the responses generally, and for interviewing women specifically. Had we been doing "street intercept" interviews -- a far less rigorous approach sometimes used by other polling firms -- finding women to interview in public would have been difficult (if not impossible) in many neighborhoods due to the current security situation in Baghdad. Conducting the interviews in the privacy of the respondent's own home allowed both women and men to feel more comfortable, and speak freely and candidly about their opinions.

Q: What was most surprising about this experience?

A: The incredible willingness of people to speak with us. We achieved a 97% cooperation rate on this survey, which is astonishing, given all that the people of Baghdad have been through. Once people had an opportunity to see the questionnaire, and they understood, both from the survey's balanced tone and the interviewer's demeanor, that there really weren't any "right" or "wrong" answers, they were eager to participate. A crucial point was that we promised them the results would be released in the media -- both in Iraq and around the world. I'm very pleased to be able to say that we have now kept that promise to them.

Not only were the survey respondents we selected incredibly responsive, but in those instances in which neighbors learned what we were doing, we sometimes had people literally following us around, asking to be interviewed next. Since this wasn't a self-selecting sample, we could not interview these individuals, of course. But this kind of eagerness is indicative of the general attitude we encountered among the Baghdad residents who participated in our survey.

A major reason that our interviews lasted 70 minutes on average was because people typically gave us very detailed replies to the questions that were open-ended. In addition, they often wanted to explain the reasons why they gave some of the responses they did to the closed-ended questions with fixed-response choices.

In short, we simply could not have asked for better cooperation. Their responses make it clear that the people of Baghdad know that the old regime is gone forever, and that they are no longer afraid to speak their minds.

It is also clear that they care very much what their future looks like, and that they both want and expect a voice in that future.

For more specifics on the survey methodology, please click here.


Gallup https://news.gallup.com/poll/9403/QA-Gallup-Poll-Baghdad.aspx
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