The Gallup Organization
Encyclopedia
The Gallup Organization, is primarily a research-based performance-management consulting company. Some of Gallup's key practice areas are - Employee Engagement, Customer Engagement and Well-Being. Gallup has over 40 offices in 27 countries. World headquarters are in Washington, D.C.
Operational headquarters are in Omaha
, Nebraska
. Its current Chairman and CEO is Jim Clifton.
Gallup currently has four divisions: Gallup Poll, Gallup Consulting, Gallup University, and Gallup Press.
grouped all of his polling operations into one organization. After Gallup's death in 1984, The Gallup Organization was sold to Selection Research, Incorporated (SRI) of Lincoln
, Nebraska in 1988. SRI, founded in 1969 by the psychologist Don Clifton, pioneered the use of talent-based structured psychological interviews.
George Gallup
founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, the precursor of The Gallup Organization, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1935. He wished to objectively determine the opinions held by the people. To ensure his independence and objectivity, Dr. Gallup resolved that he would undertake no polling that was paid for or sponsored in any way by special interest groups such as the Republican and Democratic parties, a commitment that Gallup upholds to this day.
In 1936 Gallup successfully predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alfred Landon for the U.S. presidency; this event quickly popularized the company. In 1938 Dr. Gallup and Gallup Vice President David Ogilvy began conducting market research for advertising companies and the film industry. In 1958 the modern Gallup Organization was formed from a merger of several polling organizations. Since then, Gallup has seen huge expansion into several other areas.
The Gallup family sold the firm to Selection Research, a research firm headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska
, in 1988. George Gallup, Jr.
, established the nonprofit George H. Gallup Foundation as part of the acquisition agreement.
as a reliable and objective audience measurement
public opinion
. Gallup Poll results, analyses, and videos are published daily on Gallup.com in the form of data-driven news.
Historically, the Gallup Poll has measured and tracked the public's attitudes concerning virtually every political
, social
, and economic
issue of the day, including highly sensitive or controversial subjects. In 2005, Gallup began its World Poll, which continually surveys citizens in more than 140 countries, representing 95% of the world's adult population. General and regional-specific questions, developed in collaboration with the world's leading behavioral economists, are organized into powerful indexes and topic areas that correlate with real-world outcomes.
Gallup Polls are best known for their accuracy in predicting the outcome of United States
presidential
elections
. Notable exceptions include the 1948 Thomas Dewey
-Harry S. Truman
election
, where nearly all pollsters predicted a Dewey victory. The Gallup Poll also inaccurately projected a slim victory by Gerald Ford
in 1976
, where he lost to Jimmy Carter
by a small margin. For the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Gallup was rated 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of the precision of its pre-election polls relative to the final results.
In 2008, Gallup interviewed no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults each day, providing the most watched daily tracking poll of the race between John McCain
and Barack Obama
. Gallup publishes the results of its tracking survey in a three-day rolling average on Gallup.com.
Gallup conducts 1,000 interviews per day, 350 days out of the year, among both landline and cell phones across the U.S. for its health and well-being survey.
Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
Operational headquarters are in Omaha
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
, Nebraska
Nebraska
Nebraska is a state on the Great Plains of the Midwestern United States. The state's capital is Lincoln and its largest city is Omaha, on the Missouri River....
. Its current Chairman and CEO is Jim Clifton.
Gallup currently has four divisions: Gallup Poll, Gallup Consulting, Gallup University, and Gallup Press.
History
The Gallup Organization was founded in 1958, when George GallupGeorge Gallup
George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.-Biography:...
grouped all of his polling operations into one organization. After Gallup's death in 1984, The Gallup Organization was sold to Selection Research, Incorporated (SRI) of Lincoln
Lincoln, Nebraska
The City of Lincoln is the capital and the second-most populous city of the US state of Nebraska. Lincoln is also the county seat of Lancaster County and the home of the University of Nebraska. Lincoln's 2010 Census population was 258,379....
, Nebraska in 1988. SRI, founded in 1969 by the psychologist Don Clifton, pioneered the use of talent-based structured psychological interviews.
George Gallup
George Gallup
George Horace Gallup was an American pioneer of survey sampling techniques and inventor of the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion.-Biography:...
founded the American Institute of Public Opinion, the precursor of The Gallup Organization, in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1935. He wished to objectively determine the opinions held by the people. To ensure his independence and objectivity, Dr. Gallup resolved that he would undertake no polling that was paid for or sponsored in any way by special interest groups such as the Republican and Democratic parties, a commitment that Gallup upholds to this day.
In 1936 Gallup successfully predicted that Franklin Roosevelt would defeat Alfred Landon for the U.S. presidency; this event quickly popularized the company. In 1938 Dr. Gallup and Gallup Vice President David Ogilvy began conducting market research for advertising companies and the film industry. In 1958 the modern Gallup Organization was formed from a merger of several polling organizations. Since then, Gallup has seen huge expansion into several other areas.
The Gallup family sold the firm to Selection Research, a research firm headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha, Nebraska
Omaha is the largest city in the state of Nebraska, United States, and is the county seat of Douglas County. It is located in the Midwestern United States on the Missouri River, about 20 miles north of the mouth of the Platte River...
, in 1988. George Gallup, Jr.
George Gallup, Jr.
George Horace Gallup III was an American pollster, writer and executive at the The Gallup Organization, which had been founded by his father, George Gallup...
, established the nonprofit George H. Gallup Foundation as part of the acquisition agreement.
Gallup Poll
The Gallup Poll is the division of Gallup that regularly conducts public opinion polls in more than 140 countries around the world. Gallup Polls are often referenced in the mass mediaMass media
Mass media refers collectively to all media technologies which are intended to reach a large audience via mass communication. Broadcast media transmit their information electronically and comprise of television, film and radio, movies, CDs, DVDs and some other gadgets like cameras or video consoles...
as a reliable and objective audience measurement
Audience measurement
Audience measurement measures how many people are in an audience, usually in relation to radio listenership and television viewership, but also in relation to newspaper and magazine readership and, increasingly, web traffic on websites...
public opinion
Public opinion
Public opinion is the aggregate of individual attitudes or beliefs held by the adult population. Public opinion can also be defined as the complex collection of opinions of many different people and the sum of all their views....
. Gallup Poll results, analyses, and videos are published daily on Gallup.com in the form of data-driven news.
Historically, the Gallup Poll has measured and tracked the public's attitudes concerning virtually every political
Politics
Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. The term is generally applied to the art or science of running governmental or state affairs, including behavior within civil governments, but also applies to institutions, fields, and special interest groups such as the...
, social
Social
The term social refers to a characteristic of living organisms...
, and economic
Economy
An economy consists of the economic system of a country or other area; the labor, capital and land resources; and the manufacturing, trade, distribution, and consumption of goods and services of that area...
issue of the day, including highly sensitive or controversial subjects. In 2005, Gallup began its World Poll, which continually surveys citizens in more than 140 countries, representing 95% of the world's adult population. General and regional-specific questions, developed in collaboration with the world's leading behavioral economists, are organized into powerful indexes and topic areas that correlate with real-world outcomes.
Gallup Polls are best known for their accuracy in predicting the outcome of United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
presidential
President of the United States
The President of the United States of America is the head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces....
elections
United States presidential election
Elections for President and Vice President of the United States are indirect elections in which voters cast ballots for a slate of electors of the U.S. Electoral College, who in turn directly elect the President and Vice President...
. Notable exceptions include the 1948 Thomas Dewey
Thomas Dewey
Thomas Edmund Dewey was the 47th Governor of New York . In 1944 and 1948, he was the Republican candidate for President, but lost both times. He led the liberal faction of the Republican Party, in which he fought conservative Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft...
-Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
election
United States presidential election, 1948
The United States presidential election of 1948 is considered by most historians as the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction indicated that incumbent President Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey. Truman won, overcoming a three-way...
, where nearly all pollsters predicted a Dewey victory. The Gallup Poll also inaccurately projected a slim victory by Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford
Gerald Rudolph "Jerry" Ford, Jr. was the 38th President of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, and the 40th Vice President of the United States serving from 1973 to 1974...
in 1976
United States presidential election, 1976
The United States presidential election of 1976 followed the resignation of President Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal. It pitted incumbent President Gerald Ford, the Republican candidate, against the relatively unknown former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, the Democratic...
, where he lost to Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter
James Earl "Jimmy" Carter, Jr. is an American politician who served as the 39th President of the United States and was the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, the only U.S. President to have received the Prize after leaving office...
by a small margin. For the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Gallup was rated 17th out of 23 polling organizations in terms of the precision of its pre-election polls relative to the final results.
In 2008, Gallup interviewed no fewer than 1,000 U.S. adults each day, providing the most watched daily tracking poll of the race between John McCain
John McCain
John Sidney McCain III is the senior United States Senator from Arizona. He was the Republican nominee for president in the 2008 United States election....
and Barack Obama
Barack Obama
Barack Hussein Obama II is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. Obama previously served as a United States Senator from Illinois, from January 2005 until he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.Born in...
. Gallup publishes the results of its tracking survey in a three-day rolling average on Gallup.com.
Gallup conducts 1,000 interviews per day, 350 days out of the year, among both landline and cell phones across the U.S. for its health and well-being survey.
See also
- Gallup's most admired man and woman pollGallup's most admired man and woman pollGallup’s most admired man and woman poll is an annual poll that Gallup has conducted at the end of virtually every single year since 1948. Americans are asked, without prompting, to say what man and woman "living today in any part of the world, do [they] admire most?" The result is published as a...
- Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of the 20th Century
- Approval ratingApproval ratingIn the United States, presidential job approval ratings were introduced by George Gallup in the late 1930s to gauge public support for the President of the United States during his term. An approval rating is a percentage determined by a polling which indicates the percentage of respondents to an...
- Well-being
- Behavioral economics
- UrtakUrtakUrtak is a free collaborative public opinion website founded in 2008. An urtak survey can be created by any individual for his or her community. The users of an urtak survey can add questions of their own to the survey, as well as answer questions that have been asked by other users...
- George H. Gallup HouseGeorge H. Gallup HouseThe George H. Gallup House built in 1901 is an historic octagonal house located at 703 South Chestnut Street in Jefferson, Iowa. It was the birthplace and boyhood home of Dr. George Horace Gallup, the pioneer of public opinion polling....
Further reading
- Cantril, Hadley. Gauging Public Opinion (1944)
- Converse, Jean M. Survey Research in the United States: Roots and Emergence 1890-1960 (1987)
- Gallup, George, ed. The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935-1971 (3 vol 1972), compilation of reports on thousands of Gallup polls.
- Gallup, George. Public Opinion in a Democracy (1939),
- Gallup, George. The Sophisticated Poll Watcher's Guide (1972)
- Moore, David W. The Superpollsters: How They Measure and Manipulate Public Opinion in America (1995) online edition
- Roll, Jr., Charles W. and Albert H. Cantril; Polls: Their Use and Misuse in Politics (1972) online edition