THE MISSISSIPPI POLL

Welcome to the Mississippi Poll!

The Mississippi Poll is a service to the people of Mississippi and to MSU students and faculty. Citizens can learn what average citizens are thinking about important public issues, and do not have to depend on any public official or on the mass media to learn what the opinions of Mississippians are. MSU students and faculty can use the Mississippi Poll to conduct original research, which results in their presenting papers at professional association meetings and publishing in refereed journals and other scholarly avenues.

The Mississippi Poll is conducted by undergraduate political science majors at MSU, supervised by our graduate students, under the overall direction of Professor Steve Shaffer. State-of-the-art polling facilities of MSU's Social Science Research Center are used to poll people. Every two years, we contact approximately 600 adult Mississippi residents, and ask them about one hundred questions about political issues. Our first poll was conducted in 1981 and our most recent was in 2008.

In 2008 we are inaugurating a National Poll, also sponsored by the SSRC at MSU. It is directed by Professor Barbara Patrick and assisted by alumnus and SSRC professional staff member Tonya Thornton-Neaves. Results should be available on our website in the coming months. We anticipate that this national poll will join the Mississippi Poll as a longitudinal database.

Questions Included in the Mississippi Poll, and Its Methodology:

Pooled dataset codebook, containing frequently asked questions included in many years of the Mississippi Poll.
A Summary Continuity Guide, which lists the years that each question in the pooled dataset was asked. The questions are also grouped by similar types of items. This is a quick way to choose the four variables for your research model, if you are taking the Political Analysis or Research Methods classes. I suggest that you not choose years in which items were asked in "different" form.
Continuity Guide codebook, which lists every question ever asked since 1981 on the Mississippi Poll, even if it was asked in only one year.
Methodology employed in each Mississippi Poll.
Summary of Methods used in the Mississippi Poll.
Copy of the Questionnaire for the 2004 Poll.
Copy of Questionnaire for the 2008 Poll.
Copy of the Questionnaire for the 2010 Mississippi Poll.
Copy of the Questionnaire for the 2012 Mississippi Poll.
An explanation of the 2010 weighting system, plus a short discussion of modern sampling problems.
An explanation of the 2012 weighting system.
An explanation of the 2014 weighting system.
Copy of the Questionnaire for the 2014 Mississippi Poll.

The results for frequently asked questions from all polls conducted since 1981 are available on one computer disk in a Cumulative File in an SPSS for Windows format. It makes it incredibly easy for anyone with the SPSS program to analyze the Mississippi Poll. Copies of this data source are available to MSU political science and public administration students and faculty.

Some Results from Past Polls:

Publications

The New Mississippi: Partisan and Political Attitudes in the 1990s, which includes poll results from 1981 through 1998
Stability and Change in Mississippians' Political and Partisan Views: Insights from 14 Years of Opinion Polling, includes poll results from 1981 through 1994
"Perceptions and Attitudes of Delta Residents," in A Social and Economic Portrait of the Mississippi Delta, edited by Art Cosby and other SSRC researchers.
To compare the public's party identifications across southern states, check out my publication on Republican gains in the South.
To learn about how public opinion varies across the different regions of Mississipppi, examine this publication.
A complete list of my on-line publications, most of which rely on information from the Mississippi Poll
How accurate were the state polls conducted during the 2004 presidential election?
Some speculation on racial differences in voting in the 2008 Democratic Presidential primaries.
A cautionary note about polling
Presentation to the MSU Arts and Sciences College Showcase, October 2009, on "Using the Mississippi Poll to Assess Race, Sex, and Generational Sources of Quality of Life."