BETHLEHEM, Pa. - WLVR’s Brad Klein speaks to pollster Chris Borick, the director of Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, about the challenges and rewards of conducting the surveys behind our Life in the Lehigh Valley series.
Borick said that many people associate public opinion research purely with political forecasting.
“But to me, these types of surveys are much more important," he says. "They give us a perception or a measure of how people perceive their day-to-day lives.”
The survey behind the Life in the Lehigh Valley stories captures the feelings of residents at a particular moment in time, in this case, the fall of 2022. But the decades of polling experience that Borick and the institute bring to the task, allows for the careful crafting of questions and methodologies.
Borick says it allows the results to be analyzed with an eye toward understanding how race, age, gender and a host of other factors affect the opinions of residents.
