From 1992 to 1995, we were involved in an experimental project conducted by the Prodigy online service to study the use of email for tracking public opinion over time.

astata2s.pdf is a paper describing the Prodigy experiment and some of its results that was presented at the 1995 AAPOR conference and later published in the 1995 Proceedings of the Section on Survey Research Methods of the American Statistical Association.

During the 1994 general election, Prodigy put up a good many polls to attract politically minded subscribers.  These polls were entirely self-selected and had no claim to any kind of predictability, but during the week before the election, we collected the responses for five state-wide races that had generated particular interest and applied the post-stratification methodology developed for the tracking study.

We were surprised at the accuracy of the results but paid little attention to them until much later, when we came across a listing of polls published during that election and found out just how well these online polls did when compared to the more traditional telephone methodologies.

aapor97s.pdf contains speaking notes and tables used for a talk given at the 1997 AAPOR conference describing some of the methods and results of the 1994 Prodigy election polls and comparing them to poll results for the same races published in the news media before the election.

The results presented in this paper have been credited by Humphrey Taylor, of Louis Harris & Associates, and Gordon S. Black, chairman of its parent company, with being the decisive impetus in converting the entire company to focus on Internet based surveys as HarrisInteractive. We have never had any relationship with HarrisInteractive and do not necessarily endorse their methodology.

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