Given the obvious infrastructure problems in Baghdad today, how did you interview a representative sample of Baghdad residents?
We conducted this survey using the same methodology that Gallup used for all of its public opinion polling up until just a few decades ago — interviewing people in the privacy of their own homes, using a strict, pure-probability sample. We started with the assumption that there would be no infrastructure to work with in Baghdad — no trained interviewers, no census statistics to determine population distribution, etc. — and that we would have to construct everything from scratch. In many respects, that was essentially the case, although in other respects we had more assets available than we had hoped for. We had little information on the distribution of the population, so we used high-resolution satellite imagery that could tell us what the population density of different parts of the Baghdad metropolitan area was, and subsequently help us to determine how many interviews to conduct in each neighborhood. However, after extensive efforts on the ground in Baghdad, we were able to obtai
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