Gujarat EXIT-poll Survey methodology

The recent exit poll on Gujarat Assembly election conducted by Indian Express—CNN-IBN—Divya Bhaskar—CSDS was based on a combination of the usual Exit Poll (an interview with the voter as he/she exits the polling booth) and a Post Poll survey (interview with the voter at his/her residence after the day of polling). This was done to ensure that the samples were collected more carefully and the investigators could interview the respondents at length and in privacy. Thus, for the first phase of elections, both types of interviews were used. In the post poll survey, 1,954 persons in the voters’ list were interviewed at 112 locations spread across 28 Assembly constituencies between December 11 & 13. This was supplemented by the exit poll of 1,394 respondents in 28 polling booths. For the second phase, there was only an exit poll in which 5,585 voters were interviewed at 128 polling booths in 32 Assembly constituencies. Thus in both the phases, a total of 8,933 respondents were interviewed in 60 Assembly constituencies.

The Assembly constituencies were randomly selected for the purpose. And in every constituency, four polling booths were again randomly selected. For the exit poll, the voters were randomly selected while coming out of the polling booth. For the post poll survey, the respondents were randomly selected from the voters list of the respective polling booths. The interviews were conducted in face-to face situation with the respondents using a structured interview schedule.

The respondents were fairly representative as they more or less reflected the social diversity of the population and census figures in Gujarat. It included 45 percent women, (48 per cent in the state), 10 percent Dalits (7 percent in the state), 15 percent Adivasis (15 percent in the state) and 10 per cent Muslims (9 percent in the state).

The field work of the survey was coordinated in Gujarat by Priyavadan M Patel (Vadodara) along with his colleagues Hemixa Rao (Rajkot) and Bhanu M Parmar (Anand). Sanjay Kumar of Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi directed the survey. The central team which designed, coordinated and analysed the survey comprised Yogendra Yadav, Himanshu Bhattacharya, K A Q A Hilal, Kanchan Malhotra, Praveen Rai, Sanjeer Alam, Dhananjai Joshi, Banasmita Bora, Vikas Gautam, Kinjal Sampat of CSDS and Rajeeva Karandikar of Cranes Software International Limited.

Queries regarding the survey can be sent at:

sanjaykumarcsdsgmail.com or mailto:sanjaycsdsdelhi.org