Last Friday, I met with the people at Angus Reid Global Monitor to discuss the possibility of conducting an online poll of Iranians, using the blogosphere as our point of access.
The original idea was to create an online poll for bloggers and blog-readers, a la the Iranian Weblog Research Project.
Dr. Reid himself, however, offered up a different idea: to ask Iranian bloggers to serve as individual pollsters, whereby the Global Monitor would supply, say, 100 bloggers with a short series of about 5 yes/no questions, and the bloggers would then go out into the street and ask, say, 10 different people (each from a different age group), about their opinions vis-a-vis the questions. The bloggers would then submit their findings to the Global Monitor via an online data-entry site, and the Monitor would publish the results.
The sorts of questions to be asked would be on typical western-interest stuff… i.e. respondents’ views on the nuclear issue, the holocaust, a possible US military strike, etc.
What do you think about this idea? Do you think bloggers in Iran would be willing to go out onto the street to ask people these sorts of questions?
I think the idea behind this sort of ‘on-the-street’ methodology is to use the blogosphere to provide a more accurate sampling of the (urban) Iranian population as a whole, rather than to procure a sample derived only from a very narrow blog-reading demographic.
Do you think this would be a safe and/or feasible approach? Can you think of a way to achieve a similarly ‘representative’ sample, without requiring bloggers to do any off-line legwork that could potentially reveal their identities?
Any input would be appreciated!
