POLS 299 Home

Syllabus

Assignments

Pollster.com

Polling report

WA State
Election Results

101 Gowen Hall, Box 353530
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3530
Ph: 206-616-3584

POL S 299 Special Topics: Public Opinion Research

Fall 2011: Tuesday & Thursday, Noon - 1:20pm, Smith 102

Professor: Matt A. Barreto
Email: mbarreto@uw.edu
Office: Gowen 148
Office Hours: T/TH 10:00am (or by appt)

Assignments

Participation in survey lab. There will be two different times that you are asked to collect public opinion survey data as part of your grade. The first will be in conjunction with on-going academic surveys that are overseen by UW faculty and PhD students in Political Science. The second is to implement your own public opinion survey that you will have designed with your team. The survey lab is open 4pm – 9pm Monday – Thursday, and then 12pm – 5pm on Sundays. You can sign up for days via the Doodle schedule ( Click Here)

Development of your own survey. After learning the do’s and don’ts of writing a survey, you will be asked to write your own original questions, in collaboration with a few other classmates. The survey must be up to AAPOR standards and you can consult closely with the Asher book on best practices, as well as the class lecture notes. The survey will be among registered voters in Washington state and you can develop any questions you want, so long as you can justify them as being relevant to politics and interesting.

Analysis of your survey data. Your survey is no good without tabulating the results and analyzing the data. After collecting your survey data, you will learn some very basic techniques for tabulating the results, making tables and charts, and writing a simple report. Instructions on how to get started in Stata are posted here.

Final Presentation. With your team members, you will create a powerpoint (or similar) presentation to deliver to the class which summarizes your results. All team members will be expected to be involved. Presentations during Week 10 (and maybe Finals day)