Frequently Asked Questions for Text Surveys & Web Panelists
The University of New Hampshire Survey Center operates a web panel in all six New England states (the Granite State Panel in New Hampshire, the Green Mountain State Panel in Vermont, the Pine Tree State Panel in Maine, the Bay State Panel in Massachusetts, the Nutmeg State Panel in Connecticut, and the Ocean State Panel in Rhode Island).
The panel is a new way for people in your state to express themselves and for policymakers and the public to find out how residents in your state feel about a variety of issues.
This can vary but most of the time you will get a survey about once a month or once every other month.
No worries! You can skip a survey anytime if you’re busy or just don’t feel like it.
Not a problem, you can just unsubscribe from our emails or let us know via email that you don’t want to be involved anymore.
For every survey you answer, you will be entered into quarterly drawings to win a gift card from your choice of Amazon, Hannaford or Dunkin Donuts.
Yes, we typically post releases showing the most important results on our website and on Twitter, and sometimes you will see results from surveys you participated in on the news.
Your number was picked at random from among all the numbers in the state. If you don’t want us to contact you again, just reply “STOP” to the number that texted you.
We find that most people don’t want to pick up the phone these days so we send text messages to people instead.
To make sure the panel represents your state, we can only invite people who were selected at random.
We have panels in all of the New England states, so if you are moving close by, we can easily move you to the new panel. Just let us know!
While we are probably best known for doing political surveys, we ask survey questions on a variety of non-political topics, including things like the economy, your quality of life, and travel habits.
We are never affiliated with a political party or candidate. As a part of New Hampshire’s flagship university, we pride ourselves on being nonpartisan and objective. We are a founding member of the American Association of Survey Research Organizations (AASRO - https://www.aasro.org), a group of university research centers dedicated to making surveys transparent. We are also a participating member in the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) transparency initiative (https://www.aapor.org/Transparency_Initiative.htm).
If you join the panel, we’ll send you invites right to your email address. The invites will have a link that will take you to our survey platform so you can quickly take the survey.
Not if you don’t want to. The link we send to your email will work on a desktop, a laptop, or a tablet as well as your phone.
