Measuring news consumption in a digital era

Just as American news organizations have had to drastically reevaluate their business models in the transition to digital technologies, it would make sense that researchers trying to measure the public’s news consumption need to reexamine the traditional methods they have used. A new Pew Research Center analysis explores how to best measure the public’s news consumption, addressing two questions: Which current survey practices work well, and where might changes be in order? The study is the culmination of a yearlong effort employing a multimodal approach, drawing on cognitive interviews, split-form survey experiments, comparisons between passive data and self-reported survey data, and a full, nationally representative survey.

Understanding how 2020’s election polls performed and what it might mean for other kinds of survey work

Taken in the aggregate, preelection polls in the United States pointed to the strong likelihood that Democrat Joe Biden would pick up several states that Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and, in the process, win a popular and electoral vote majority over Republican President Donald Trump. That indeed came to pass – but the election was much closer than polls suggested in several battleground states and more decisive for Trump elsewhere. On Fact Tank, Pew Research Center’s survey methodology experts provide a preliminary characterization of the nature and scope of the 2020 polling errors and suggest some possible causes.

A voter data resource: Detailed demographic tables about verified voters in 2016, 2018

To assist journalists and the public in making comparisons of 2020 data to the electorates of 2016 and 2018, the Center published an expanded set of data tables from interviews we conducted with national samples of verified voters in the wake of the 2016 and 2018 elections. Interviews from 2016 were matched to five different commercial voter files that contain official records of voter registration and turnout, while the 2018 data was matched to two voter files. The data can be used to explore how different groups voted in the elections and how voters and nonvoters differed; it can also be used to look at demographic differences between the Clinton and Trump coalitions.

• Access the detailed spreadsheet here

Exploring differences in how Democrats and Republicans behave on Twitter

Twitter has become a popular venue for Americans to engage with issues of the day, but not all U.S. adults use the platform in similar ways. Pew Research Center’s Data Labs team recently published an analysis examining the different ways in which members of the two major U.S. political parties engage with the platform. Researchers collected the Twitter handles of more than 3,500 U.S. adult volunteers and used the Twitter API to study their activity over a period of ten months, from November 2019 through September 2020. The study found that top 10% most active users produced 92% of all tweets from U.S. adults during the study period and that 69% of these highly prolific users identify as Democrats.

New on “Decoded”

Pew Research Center’s Decoded blog focuses on the “how” behind our numbers. The blog features content ranging from survey methods, to data science, to data visualization, and allows researchers to build on and engage with our work. Explore some of our latest posts:

• Urban, suburban or rural? Americans’ perceptions of their own community type differ by party
• Testing survey questions ahead of time can help sharpen a poll’s focus
• How focus groups informed our study about nationalism and international engagement in the U.S. and UK
• Adapting how we ask about the gender of our survey respondents

Featured datasets