Understanding error bars in charts
Error bars illustrate the margin of error for a survey estimate by showing how precise that estimate is. Here are some answers to common questions that might help you better understand charts with error bars.
A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center.
For our latest findings, visit pewresearch.org.
Latest from Decoded
-
Why and how we’re weighting surveys for past presidential vote
This piece explains why, when and how we are weighting our surveys on Americans’ past vote.
-
How online discussion boards informed our study of what ‘news’ means to Americans
We share the “why” and “how” behind our use of an online discussion board as a qualitative research method.
-
How a glitch in an online survey replaced the word ‘yes’ with ‘forks’
Dating back to at least early 2023, a bizarre and alarming technical glitch started popping up in some organizations’ online surveys and forms.
-
Validating 2022 voters in Pew Research Center’s survey data
Knowing who voted is critical to developing an accurate understanding of an election’s outcome.
-
Pew Research Center’s tips for journalists covering polls – during election season and beyond
We’ve compiled some tips for journalists who use polling in their work during election season and beyond.
-
How Pew Research Center is – and is not – using large language models in our work
In this post, we’ll share our current guidelines for the internal use of large language models and potential areas of experimentation.
-
What a survey experiment tells us about measuring religious tolerance in Australia
We ran a survey experiment on religious tolerance in Australia to examine whether respondents’ answers capture a general distaste for religion rather than intolerance for particular religious groups.
-
Measuring partisanship in Europe: How online survey questions compare with phone polls
We compared three different online survey methods in certain countries to see which one would most closely replicate our phone results.
-
Reproducibility as part of code quality control
In this post, we discuss reproducibility as a part of Pew Research Center’s code review process.
-
Redacting identifying information with computational methods in large text data
In this post, we discuss three methods to identify and remove specific words and phrases in unstructured text data.
Search All Decoded Posts
To search or browse all of Pew Research Center findings and data by topic, visit pewresearch.org