NYU Journalism Toolbox (Bobst Library)

Understanding Polls

NewsUniversity has just released a new self-paced tutorial on understanding and interpreting polls. Enrollment is free to registered users. (Registration is also free!)

Finding Polls and Surveys

• Roper Center Public Opinion Archives [NYU-Only]
  Contains nearly half a million survey questions and answers asked in the US over the last 65 years by more than 150 survey organizations.
• Polling the Nations [NYU-Only]
  Covers polls taken on a variety of subjects all over the world; includes poll question and participants’ responses. Includes a handy selection of pre-defined topics for locating polls. Coverage is 1986 forward. Includes US and international surveys.
• Gallup Brain [NYU-Only]
  Includes answers to more than 125,000 questions and responses from more than 3.5 million people interviewed by The Gallup Poll since 1935.

• PollingReport.com
  This site includes some free national polls. (State polls require a subscription.) Polls typically go from 1998 forward. This source tends to focus on polls of a political and social nature.
• Pew Research Center
  This site serves as a gateway to the eight Pew projects:* Pew Research Center for the People & the Press
  * Project for Excellence in Journalism
  * Stateline.org
  * Pew Internet & American Life Project
  * Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life
  * Pew Hispanic Center
  * Pew Global Attitudes Project
  * Social & Demographic Trends
  “The Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan “fact tank” that provides information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping America and the world. It does so by conducting public opinion polling and social science research; by reporting news and analyzing news coverage; and by holding forums and briefings. It does not take positions on policy issues.”(from the Pew Center: http://pewresearch.org/about/)

Databases like LexisNexis don’t provide historical coverage of newspapers. Coverage rarely extends beyond the 1980s. So, if you’re looking for older, searchable newspapers you’ll need to use a different resource. Enter the Historical newspapers from Proquest.

About:
These databases provide cover-to-cover indexing of the newspapers and include PDFs of the newspapers, so it is as though you were looking at the newspaper itself.

Titles Available:

• Historical New York Times
• Historical Chicago Tribune
• Historical Washington Post
• Historical Los Angeles Times
• Historical Wall Street Journal
• Historical Chicago Defender
• Historical Christian Science Monitor
• Historical Atlanta Constitution

Search tips:

• Search all of the titles simultaneously. (To do this, once you click on the title, scroll to the bottom of the Proquest menu and checkmark your titles.)
• Use Advanced Search
• Enter your keywords and select “Citation and Abstract” from the pulldown menu; this will help to ensure relevancy.
• Enter a date range to further limit your results.

Looking at your results

• The Page map feature allows you to look entire newspaper page containing the article.

London Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)
Readers Guide Retrospective.
Use Readers Guide to see what the popular news magazines were covering?

About:
Reader’s Guide Retrospective indexes articles from the popular literature (magazines include Time, US News and World Report, etc.) and covers the years 1890-1982.

Search tips:

• Search using basic keywords. Don’t make your searches too complex.
  If you look at the record of an item, you’ll see that it has very limited info to search on. Many records do not include abstracts, so that limits its ability to search even more.
• Click on the NYU Link to find the item.
  Once you find an item that looks relevant, you’ll need to click on the NYU link to see if we have the item in full-text (not likely for older materials). If full-text is not available, click on the NYU in hard copy or microform.