Are You Aware Of The Difference Between a Survey and A Poll?

Whenever any market research is conducted by asking people many different questions then people generally call it an opinion poll or survey and both these terms used appear to be expressing the same thing. But whether any surveys or opinion polls are the same thing?

There are many marketing research companies that conduct opinion polls as well as a survey using theirpre-profiled panel of respondents. Now the question is for your market analysis, poll or survey: which should you do?

Let us, therefore, in this post try to understand these two terms accurately to understand them more clearly so that we can understand what are the differences between these two approaches.

What is a poll?

By conducting a poll, it will be possible to know what the choice of people is and what kind of understanding they have on a certain issue. With the help of any polls, you can measure what are the chances of success of a certain event or initiative that was taken and has been carried out at different stages.

At what interval you conduct polls will depend on what sort of data that you want to extract from your respondents.

In earlier days, most polls were conducted by asking a question to any person. The questions could also be posed to a group of people too. Later this has started with the help of telephone survey polls where a respondent is expected to dial a certain number as his or her answer. Today since we are in the digital world, hence polls are now conducted online and users just need to click for a certain answer.

With the help of such online polls, a market researcher can gauge the pulse of the people and then create a strategy based on the majority opinion.

What is a survey?

In the case of a survey, information is obtained from a certain set of people, so that the general view of people can be understood from a larger population. Through such surveys, significant data can be generated about any business or about any government policy.

Every year the market research companies conduct many surveys to understand the preferences and choices based on the experiences of different customers and employees. Generally, these surveys are conducted in certain different formats and are distributed through various mediums.

During earlier times such surveys were carried out by talking to a person or with the help of telephonic calls. Later, it changed to in written format where people were asked to tick on the appropriate answer. These days, the same thing is done online where people need to click on a certain choice to express their opinion.

Online surveys may consist of many different types of questions where one has to click on either a single choice or multiple-choice and even open-ended text. All the responses are gathered through email.

What is the difference?

In the case of a poll, general opinions from people are sought based on a few fixed options, whereas in the survey there are multiple views are sought, and also there is a scope of getting certain new ideas or opinions too.