Panel Methodology
YouGov has built up a panel of over 200,000 electors throughout Great Britain.
Registration
In order to register with YouGov, each panel member completes a detailed profiling questionnaire and sets up an account name and password. This questionnaire enables us to select a representative sample of electors each time we conduct a survey – representative, that is, of the electorate as a whole, and not simply of our panel. For example, our pool divides 56% men, 44% women; but when we draw a sample for our national political surveys, we select 52% women, 48% men (reflecting the actual proportions in the electorate).
Recruitment & Incentives
Our pool is recruited from a wide variety of sources. We proactively recruit our panel with targeted campaigns via non-political websites, and specialist recruitment agencies have also been used to contact specific groups, to ensure an appropriate demographic balance. People can also join the panel through the open site, although self-recruited sample is identified as such and not generally used for published political polls.
Although our pool is not an exact representation of the British public, it contains enough people in each major demographic group to draw samples that do represent the electorate as a whole. This is because: a) our pool is sufficiently large to capture Britain’s diversity; b) the company’s recruitment strategy seeks to maximise the chances of obtaining a broadly-based panel; and c) the internet itself has now reached all parts of British society.
Respondents receive a small incentive for completing YouGov surveys. The purpose is to ensure that samples are as representative as possible, and that responses are not tilted towards those passionately interested in the subject of the particular survey. Incentives range typically from 50p to £1 per survey, through cash payments to an online account which pays out when the panel member reaches £50, as well as occasional cash prizes.
Conducting Surveys
When we conduct a survey, our first step is to select a sub-group of our pool that is representative of the electorate as a whole. We then email the selected panel members and invite them to complete the survey by clicking on an Internet link. In order to complete the survey they must log in and provide their password. This ensures that the right people complete the survey, and enables their answers to be matched to the demographics they provided when they registered with YouGov.
Response rates of at least 40% are normally achieved within 24 hours and 60% within 72 hours. Little difference has been detected between early and later responses, once the data has been weighted to demographic and attitudinal variables, including past vote and newspaper readership.
When fieldwork is complete, the raw data is adjusted, taking account of age, gender, social class, newspaper readership and past vote, to ensure that our published results represent the view of the electorate as a whole. Naturally, YouGov abides by the Market Research Society’s strict guidelines on confidentiality. We never divulge anything that might identify the views of individual respondents.
