tional materials, including The Basic Primer on Public Opinion Polling, we hope to
ensure that this exercise is woven into the classroom curriculum in a meaningful way.
Furthermore, by surveying only one class in each school, we impose on the school as
little as possible. Students were given envelopes in which to seal their completed sur-
veys before returning them to the teacher. Please note that the survey instrument is
anonymous; at no point was the student asked to provide his or her name.
All interviews were carefully edited and checked for completeness and accuracy.
Surveys with significant errors or large proportions of missing data were removed;
typically this represents less than 1% of the questionnaires that arrive in-house.
However, as with all self-administered questionnaires, occasional questions were
sometimes left blank. Findings for each question are reported based on the total
number of potential respondents in the sample. As an overall check, each question-
naire was reviewed to ensure that a majority of all possible responses had been com-
pleted.
Online Survey
The survey questionnaire was self-administered online by means of the Internet to
2894 public school students in grades 7 through 12 who have access to the Internet.
Interviews averaged 20 minutes in length and were conducted between March 24,
2000 and April 2, 2000.
Sample was drawn from the Harris Poll Online database of approximately 6.5
million households who are registered as participants. In order to reach students in
grades 7 through 12, the sample was drawn from the Youth Panel, which is a subset
of the Harris Interactive Panel of Cooperative Respondents. Currently, there are
nearly 500,000 HPOL members under the age of 18.
Email addresses for households in the database are obtained from participation
in the following sources: Youth Panel web communities (HarrisZone.com and
HarrisKidZone.com), Harris Poll Online registration, the Harris/Excite Poll, Harris
Poll Online banner advertisements, Excite and Netscape product registrations,
Harris telephone research, media recruitment, and sweepstakes sponsored by
Matchlogic and its subsidiaries (e.g., DeliverE, Preferences.com, etc.). Invitations for
this study were emailed to a selected sample of the database identified as being 13 to
20 years old and residing in the U.S.A.
Interviews were conducted using a self-administered, online questionnaire, via
Harris's proprietary, web-assisted interviewing software. The Harris Online inter-
viewing system permits online data entry of interviews by the respondents.
Questionnaires are programmed into the system with the following checks:
1. Question and response series
2. Skip patterns
3. Question rotation
4. Range checks
5. Mathematical checks
6. Consistency checks
7. Special edit procedures
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