Polling in Iraq: Planning, Luck and Tragic Stories

March 19, 2007 &#0151 -- Polling in Iraq takes extensive planning, coordinated effort -- and some luck. Not least is that every interviewer, all Iraqis, returned home safely from the field work for the latest ABC News poll, co-sponsored by USA Today, the BBC and ARD German TV.

That's no small feat. More than 100 people worked in the field to complete the survey, randomly selecting and interviewing 2,212 Iraqi adults in 458 locales across the country from Feb. 25 to March 5. Interviewers and supervisors kept journal entries of their experiences -- and while most were relatively uneventful, that wasn't always the case.

Several brought back harrowing tales of having witnessed some of the bombings, shootings and beatings that, as the survey shows, are widespread in Iraq (see main poll analysis).

In Diyala province, one interviewer reported, "Two bombs exploded in front of the public market and destroyed it, then dead bodies spread everywhere in front of us in a very awful way."

On March 5, also in Diyala, another wrote, "In front of me, an explosive went off under an American patrol and the other American patrol started random shooting, which almost got all of us killed hadn't it been for the mercy of God Almighty."

Several teams of interviewers were detained and questioned by Iraqi police. Others were harassed; one had his camera smashed by an "armed person." All nonetheless completed their assignments.

FIELD WORK -- Field work for the survey was managed by D3 Systems of Vienna, Va., and KA Research Ltd. of Istanbul, which began jointly polling in Iraq in summer 2004. D3, which specializes in polling in difficult conditions, co-managed the field work for ABC News polls (one of them with the BBC World Service) in Afghanistan in 2005 and 2006.