About Us

The University of South Alabama Polling Group was found 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. Over its eleven-years history, the Polling Group has conducted over 600 surveys.

Services
Services Include design consultation, sample composition, questionnaire development, data preparation, data input, quantitative analysis, and reporting. While our primary focus is telephone surveys, the Polling Group can also facilities focus groups, coordinate mail questionnaires, and provide data entry services.

Facilities
The Polling Group’s fully equipped interview lab is housed in Room # 28 of the Humanities Building. The facility consists of two powerful servers and 20 polling stations utilizing a state-of-the-art computer assisted telephone-interviewing system. Electronic versions of survey data and results can be provided in any commonly used software format for either the PC or Mac platform.

Staffing
Keith Nicholls, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Political Science, serves as Director of the Polling Group. Roman Tereshchuk, MPA, is the Associate Director. There are two floor supervisors, Casey McKenzie and Katharine Richards, and a pool of 30 to 40 trained interviewers which include both student and non-student workers. In addition, faculty consultants representing a wide variety of disciplines and methodologies support the Polling Group.