State of Iran Survey Series (Dec 2018 wave)

As almost one year has passed since President Trump’s decision on abrogating the Iran nuclear deal, we would like to attract your attention to IranPoll’s new wave in the “State of Iran” survey series conducted among a representative sample of Iranians on December 2018. The “State of Iran” survey series is designed to track the trends regarding Iranian people’s attitudes toward the foreign policy, nuclear deal, and Iran’s state of economy.

The survey shows that while vast majority of Iranians continue saying that Iran’s economy is bad and that it is getting worse, there are slight signs of improvements in the trend (Q1-2 and Slides 7-8). Keeping up with the previous trend, increasing majority say that the nuclear deal has not yet been able to improve the living condition of ordinary Iranians (Q6 and Slide 14). In addition, Iranians are becoming less confident that other P5+1 countries will live by the terms of the JCPOA (Q9 and Slide 10). They also blame European countries for moving too slow to meet their obligations under JCPOA (Q10-11 and Slides 11-12).

Meantime JCPOA’s popularity decline has finally plateaued in its all-time-low, and a stable majority of Iranians support it even after knowing what in reality it can offer (Q5 and Slide 16). Even under the pressure of looming conflict with West, majority of Iranians keep believing that it is possible to find common ground for peaceful coexistence with West (Q24 and Slide 18). This optimistic view towards possibility for peace, has been a stable trend over years of IranPoll’s opinion polling in Iran.

For Dec 2018 wave, telephone interviews of 1,017 Iranians were done on December 4–12, 2018. The margin of error was +/- 3.1%. It was a nationally representative survey using our standard probabilistic sampling as detailed here.

MAIN FINDINGS:

Below please find the results of this survey in greater detail.

• The frequency tables of survey results are available here.

• The PowerPoint slides highlighting some of the survey results based on a presentation made by Dr. Amir Farmanesh CEO of People Analytics (IranPoll) are available here.

MEDIA COVERAGE:

Below are links to the articles covering this poll:

Iran Social Survey (ISS)

From November 6 to December 29, 2016, IranPoll conducted a nationally representative survey with a sample size of 5,005 for Princeton University using our standard probabilistic sampling as detailed here. The results of this survey are published here, and the full PDF report is also available here.

The data were collected as a part of Iran Social Survey (ISS). IranPoll interviewers for ISS project asked respondents about civil society participation, household usage of state social services, self-identification across ethnic or language groups, and family demographics including parents and grandparents’ occupational histories.

The scholars from Princeton University and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) who were in charge of this study conducted a number of quality controls on the data collected for them by IranPoll. They concluded in their final report (page 24):

“Recent technological advances have afforded social scientists new opportunities to monitor the design and implementation of survey questions, participate in fieldwork, and improve various quality control mechanisms, such as listening to a sample of recorded interviews. […]

Importantly, self-reported demographic and turnout data, as described above, match figures found in the Iranian census and released by the Ministry of Interior. Falsification techniques, such as calculating the percentage of matching interviews, were applied to the data as an additional check after the survey data was initially collected.”

On Feb 4, 2018, one of the scholars in charge of the project from Princeton University published further details about the quality control techniques they utilized to test IranPoll data on his Twitter account available here. The scholar concluded:

“We took advantage of existing techniques to ensure we could trust the data: for example, we listened to a random sample of anonymized interviews to gauge the comfort level of respondents. We tested different terms to ensure the reliable measurement of important concepts. […]

We used this technique (percentMatch) after we conducted our own survey with @IranPoll. Here is what we found: a normal distribution, zero interviews with a maximum percent match of 85%, 45 interviews (<1%) with a maximum percent match over 80%.”

IranPoll is proud that our collected data satisfied the scientific standards and quality control techniques conducted by these scholars.

Below are three images from the report and the result of the “percentMatch” technique as published on Twitter (mentioned above):

University of Maryland quality control report on data collected by IranPoll

On January 16–24, 2018, IranPoll conducted a nationally representative survey for the University of Maryland CISSM using our standard probabilistic sampling as detailed here. The initial results of this survey were published here.

Since then, University of Maryland CISSM scholars have conducted several quality control tests on the survey data IranPoll collected for them and evaluated the data quality in detail through multiple measures.

The results of these tests were published on July 2018 as an appendix to the main study’s full report. Full report is available on University of Maryland CISSM’s website accessible here. The detailed methodology appendix is also available here as a PDF.

IranPoll is proud that our collected data satisfied the scientific standards on every quality control test conducted by the University of Maryland CISSM scholars.

The quality control tests conducted on the survey data and their summary results are presented here:

• Comparison with official data:

  • University of Maryland scholars concluded: “In general, there is a close match between the figures of this survey and the most recent official census conducted by the Statistical Center of Iran in 2016.”

• Comparison with other credible sources:

  • University of Maryland scholars concluded: “There was a close match between percentage of respondents who say they follow the news programs of BBC Persian and the viewership estimates provided by BBC Persian itself.”

• Percent Match Technique for data falsification detection:

  • University of Maryland scholars concluded: “The Percent Match technique showed no evidence of data fabrication in this survey. The outcome was a normal distribution. There were zero interviews with a maximum percent match of 85%, and only 4 interviews (0.5%) with a maximum percent match of 75%.”

• Interview Length Analysis:

  • University of Maryland scholars concluded: “In another attempt to check for falsification and other irregularities, we compared the length of each interview and the time each respondent took to answer each question and compared it to the average interview length and question answer time. We were looking for patterns and anomalies that might indicate respondents were giving rapid rote answers or struggling to understand the questions. This exercise did not expose any particular irregularity.”

• Sensitive Question Analysis.

  • University of Maryland scholars concluded: “To assess the likelihood that respondents held back their own true opinions and, instead, provided answers in line with positions articulated in Iranian state-owned news media, CISSM assessed what proportion of the sample consistently provided responses to politically sensitive questions that were in line with the stated positions of the Iranian government. Only 1.9% of the respondents provided answers that are systematically and fully in line with stated positions of the Iranian government. Almost everyone (98.1%) gave at least one response that is directly at odds with positions articulated in Iranian state-owned news media.”