Weighting: General Overview

Weighting is a technique used to make sure your survey results reflect the true makeup of your community. Often, certain groups, like older adults and homeowners, respond to surveys more than others, such as younger adults and renters. Weighting helps balance this by giving more influence to underrepresented groups and reducing the weight of overrepresented ones. This way, the final results better reflect your entire community.

Weighting is a standard practice in survey research to ensure your data is as accurate as possible. For surveys conducted by Polco’s research team, weighting is automatically applied to ensure balanced results. If you're conducting your own surveys through Polco's Engage module, automatic weighting is available as well (contact us at success@polco.us for more info).

However, weighting alone isn’t enough. It’s important to combine it with outreach efforts that target groups who may not typically participate. Use Polco’s representivity graphs to guide your outreach and bring more diverse voices into your surveys. This approach ensures more inclusive and accurate results.