OpEdNews - Diary: OpEdNews is adding more demographic questions for members-a lot more. Here's Why

OEN is adding a long list of demographic questions to our already long list. The main reason is we are taking our polling to the next level, so we actually provide demographic information as well as straight percentages.

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OpEdNews was the first progressive media website to commission a poll by a nationally respected pollster. We’ve done several poll projects and we’ve learned a bit about polling—caught the bug. So, when we planned on adding polling to our site, we decided, as we try to do with most of our projects, to do it better than it’s done anywhere else on the web. In this case, that meant providing demographic results as well as the basic numbers.

If you to go other sites that do polls, like Dailykos, you get the percentage of people who voted for each option in the poll. We are already doing that. But we’re adding the information that pollsters usually charge a fortune for—info on how people voted based on demographics—gender, age, education, ideology, race, party.

To do the demographic analysis we need to have the demographic data. That means we need you to provide it. We are requiring you to fill in your gender, education and location. The rest are optional. But, if you don’t fill in the info, you won’t be able to see how others voted. You won’t have access to the statistics for the demographic info you don’t fill in.

We’re not going to let anyone else know the demographic info you fill in. We are never going to share it without your permission. Down the road, we’ll be adding “relationships” with different levels of privacy, at which time, you will be able to allow some people to see more about you. But we’ll never give your info out without your explicit permission on who to give it to. We’ll never give your name, for example, to an advertiser.

I ‘ll repeat. You do NOT have to give any demographic data other than the basic gender, location and education. We call our model ISYMIYSMY—I show you mine if you show me yours.

We’re excited about this project. To our knowledge, no other site allows members to create polls and see such detailed results. We hope it will challenge our members to create some very creative polls. We’re also inviting members to suggest other demographic questions for us to consider adding. This is going to be fun and fascinating.

Here are the basic questions we’ve either already been asking or that we’ll be adding.

It’ll be great if, when they are all on line, you answer them. Or, you’ll be able to, when you see a poll where you want to see the results, fill them in then.

The demographic questions below are not cast in stone. If you have any ideas on how to improve them, on other questions, or if you have problems with these, please add a comment.

Demographic category: Gender
Male/Female

Location by state, Zip, Congressional district

Demographic: Sexual Preference
Heterosexual
Gay/Bisexual/Transexual

Demographic: Ethnic Background
Caucasian
Black
Hispanic
Asian
Aboriginal (first nation, Native American, etc.)

Demographic: Age
18-24, 25-35, 36-45, 46-60, 61-70, 70-79, 80-99

Demographic; Religion
Catholic
Protestant
Jewish
(other denominations we ask)
Atheist/Agnostic
Pagan/Wiccan

Born Again
Yes
No

Ideology
Progressive
Liberal
Moderate
conservative
Very Conservative

Party
Democratic
Republican
Independent
Libertarian
Green
Other

Military or Military In Family
Yes
No

Union: member or family member in union
Yes
No

Marital Status:
Married
Never Married
Divorced/separated/widowed
Civil Union/Gay Marriage

Income Range
Use our existing ranges

Live In:
Lge City
Small CIty
Suburbs
Rural

Children 17 or under in the home
Yes
No

NASCAR Fan
Yes
No

Network Most Watched for News
ABC
CBS
NBC
CNN
MSNBC
FOX News