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Polling is an incredibly effective way of raising awareness, building community support, and equipping your group with a powerful tool to use in your advocacy efforts. If you intend to convince local officials that your community supports comprehensive sexuality education, you may want to develop a carefully designed, high quality survey of community members. These basic principles can help make this task more manageable.

Target Your Questions

Try to keep your poll short as people will be more likely to participate if it appears that it will not take up too much of their time. It is important to ask just a few targeted questions. For example, ask parents if they support sexuality education,  if sexuality education courses should include particular topics, and if teaching should begin at a certain age. You may also ask community members who they feel is responsible for providing sexuality education: parents, schools, faith-based organizations, health care providers, or all of the above?

Be Diverse

Survey results are most accurate and most compelling when they include responses from a diverse sampling of the community. Set up a polling station at various locations, at different times of the day, and on different days of the week. You may wish to set up a table at community centers, supermarkets, malls, health clubs, train stations, and other high traffic areas. If it is safe and reasonable to do so, consider polling door to door or over the phone. After they have completed the survey, provide participants with simple and concise materials about the need for sexuality education as well as information on how they can get involved in supporting comprehensive sexuality education.

Include Statistics

Questions that include information about local teen pregnancy and STD statistics and that inquire about whether or not people are concerned over these issues can raise awareness of the need for comprehensive sexuality education. Make sure to have information for interested participants about how to get involved.

Craft Questions Carefully

Keep in mind that how you craft your questions will have a drastic impact on the results you get. Asking “Do you support teaching abstinence?” will get very different answers than asking “Do you support teaching abstinence-only- until-marriage?” You can avoid confusing or poorly worded items by conducting a pilot survey with at least 20 participants and rewriting problematic items before conducting the full-scale poll.

Go To Them

Set up an information table at the mall, grocery store, movie theater, train station, or other high traffic area.  Ask passersby to take your poll.

SHARING RESULTS

When you conduct a poll, you must prepare for the possibility that the results may not be what you expect or desire. In this case, you may not want to publicize your results or you may choose to use only selected results, such as answers to one favorable question. Once you’ve publicized any of the results, however, be prepared to share the complete results of your survey. (See “Sample Community Survey” for more information.)