Iraq Poll: Note on Methodology

March 19, 2007 -- -- This survey was conducted for ABC News, USA Today, the BBC and ARD German TV by D3 Systems of Vienna, Va., and KA Research Ltd. of Istanbul. Interviews were conducted in person, in Arabic or Kurdish, among a random national sample of 2,212 Iraqis aged 18 and up from Feb. 25-March 5, 2007.

Four hundred and fifty-eight sampling points were distributed proportionate to population size in each of Iraq's 18 provinces, then in each of the 102 districts within the provinces, then by simple random sampling among Iraq's nearly 11,000 villages or neighborhoods, with urban/rural stratification at each stage.

Maps or grids were used to select random starting points within each sampling point, with household selection by random interval and within-household selection by the "next-birthday" method. An average of five interviews were conducted per sampling point. Three of the 458 sampling points were inaccessible for security reasons and were substituted with randomly selected replacements.

Interviews were conducted by 103 trained Iraqi interviewers with 27 supervisors. Just over half of interviews were back checked by supervisors -- 28 percent by direct observation, 14 percent by revisits and 10 percent by phone.

In addition to the national sample, oversamples were drawn in Anbar province, Sadr City, Basra city and Kirkuk city to allow for more reliable analysis in those areas. Population data came from 2005 estimates by the Iraq Ministry of Planning. The sample was weighted by sex, age, education, urban/rural status and population of province.

The survey had a contact rate of 90 percent and a cooperation rate of 62 percent for a net response rate of 56 percent. Including an estimated design effect of 1.51, the results have a margin of sampling error of 2.5 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.

SUNNI/SHIITE (3/22/07) -- Given the attitudinal differences between Shiite and Sunni Arabs in Iraq, there's interest in the relative sizes of these two population groups. As far as we have been able to ascertain there is no official Iraqi estimate of the country's Sunni vs. Shiite Arab populations, and no single authoritative source of empirical data on the subject.