Want to promote respect for a specific human right? You'll need to know what the public thinks, and how much it trusts you and your funders. You'll also want to learn which segments of the population would be most willing to support your efforts, and which will be more skeptical.
Once you do your advocacy work, moreover, you'll want to learn whether your efforts had impact. Who has listened to your message and been persuaded? Who hasn't, and why?
The OpenGlobalRights Human Rights Perception Polls (HRPPs) are a battery of questions about the public's attitudes towards human rights principles, policies, and actors. They also include a wide variety of socio-demographic, religious, and attitudinal questions to help you analyze these data with greater nuance and understanding. Among many other question, the HRPP helps us identify the characteristics of human rights supporters and skeptics; understand the publics’ interpretation of the phrase, “human rights”; and assess public views of foreign funding for domestic NGOs.
The Nuts & Bolts
- We begin each project with a battery of rights-related questions, to which we add custom-designed items based on individual project requirements.
- We design and implement each project in consultation with funders and partners, carefully choose a local survey firm, and work on-site with survey implementors to ensure the highest quality translations, sampling, interviews, and data capture.
- We supervise enumerator training and survey pilots in person, carefully review all sampling decisions, and keep tight watch over all stages of the data-collection process.
- We typically interview respondents face-to-face, unless internet penetration is very high.
- We analyze the data, using sophisticated statistical techniques.
- We write comprehensive reports in practitioner-friendly formats.
Where We've Worked
As of fall 2017, we had fielded customized versions of the Human Rights Perception Poll in Colombia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, and India. We do our Latin America national surveys in partnership with the Americas and the World consortium based at CIDE in Mexico City. Consortium members have inserted many of our questions into their own surveys in other Latin American countries.
