Earlier this year, NOlympics LA conducted an online survey to gauge public opinion of the 2028 Summer Olympics across California and within LA County. This was primarily a response to the overwhelming lack of public input and dialogue around LA’s bid for the 2024 and 2028 Games, as well as the lack of independent polling conducted by local media and research institutions.
To date, only 3 polls and surveys have been conducted around the 2028 Olympics: one commissioned by the bid committee, one commissioned by the IOC and one commissioned by us (NOlympics LA). We do not consider any of them to be independent or adequate substitutes for meaningful dialogue with the communities who will be most affected and at risk.
The results of our survey were markedly different than those commissioned by the bid committee and IOC, showing that almost half of respondents in California and L.A. County oppose hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. You can read our analysis of the results ( RMarkdown presentation), and see some examples of open responses from people who took the survey here.
In the spirit of continuing to provide as much information as possible to people who ask us questions, we wanted to share responses to some of the questions we got from supporters, journalists, and skeptics who saw the results of our survey, but weren’t sure how to interpret them. This is our FAQ on surveys and data.
We believe in sharing our data, analyses, codebook and the survey itself to help demystify surveys, and how public opinion is measured and to aid data users in designing and getting experience analyzing survey data. The output from Survey Monkey - the vendor we used to supply random public responses is quite alike data output from Qualtrics and other survey vendors.
We hope that these are helpful for looking at the results of any survey or poll that you see reported in the media or referenced anywhere else.
Survey data can have a range of question types that can make analysis tricky. Multiple response questions - those that ask respondents to answer more than one question, have output that is split across multiple questions, these need to be wrangled, melted, or consolidated in order to be summarised or enumerated correctly.
The sky is open regarding visualizations of quantitative and qualitative questions.
Additionally there is wide variety of hypotheses to test beyond the questions as written, are there different demographic types answering questions in certain ways? Do you have enough sample for cross-tabs to be statistically significant? Is the sample of survey respondents sufficient to match the general population? Do they need to be re-weighted?
Helpful Packages
Example Visualizations