About the USA Polling Group / Survey Research Center

The University of South Alabama Polling Group was founded in 1992 for the primary purpose of conducting weekly public opinion polls for the Mobile Register Newspaper. Since its founding, the activities of the polling group have expanded to include a wide variety of externally, funded research projects in anthropology, community relations, criminal justice, educational administration, healthcare, marketing, public administration, and sociology. Throughout its history, the polling group has conducted well over 600 surveys for various clients.

Services

Services include questionnaire design consultation, sample composition, questionnaire development, data preparation, data input, quantitative analysis, and reporting. While our primary focus is telephone surveys, the polling group also conducts mail and internet surveys, and provides data entry services.

Facilities

The USA Polling Group's fully equipped interviewing lab is housed in Room 28 of the Humanities Building. The facility consists of a server, a supervisor station, and 10 Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) stations utilizing the CI3/Sawtooth CATI system. Electronic versions of survey data can be provided in any commonly used software format (e.g. Excel, SPSS, STATA, etc.).

Staffing

Thomas Shaw, Ph.D., Associate of Professor of Political Science, serves as the Director of the Polling Group.

Jaclyn Bunch, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Political Science, serves as the Assistant Director of the Polling Group.

Daniel Newton and Cecelia Hunter also serve as Supervisors.