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Wilson Center for Public Research

Wilson Center for Public Research
Rockman & Sons Publishing
AlliedMedia

Wilson Center for Public Research, Inc.
8240 Professional Place
Landover MD 20785

The Wilson Center differs from conventional employment survey companies in several key aspects. The Center operates as a non-stock, not-for-profit Corporation and was established in 1985 to gather information on the views of working people regarding their jobs, management and the role of employee organizations. To date, in connection with more than 9,000 major work place studies, we have conducted telephone interviews with about 2.5 million working people. We have conducted telephone interviews in 14 languages.

Since its inception the Wilson Center has conducted pre-bargaining surveys, studies of servicing and communications, organizing and recruitment studies and polls that focus on special issues. We employ demographically stratified random sampling to insure high precision. We ask our union clients to pre-announce all our studies to their membership. This augments the response rate and enhances accuracy. Among pilots, our average response rate is 91% which significantly mitigates self-selection bias. All non-responders are asked why they are not participating. This information and their demographic characteristics are analyzed to further mitigate self-selection bias. Our starting point is to collect highly accurate data. We then provide a detailed interpretive analysis and recommendations. Almost all of our work is conducted on behalf of labor unions or employee associations. We have also done some work for joint labor-management committees. Additionally, our staff has published several articles and made presentations regarding our general, non-confidential findings to a wide range of organizations.

The various types of telephone polls we conduct include:

Polls of workers in large non-union bargaining units before, during or after organizing efforts.
Polls of union members prior to major negotiations.
Polls of union members regarding servicing and communication efforts by their local unions.
Joint labor-management polls to evaluate cooperative efforts and to facilitate organizational change.
On-going tracking polls to follow trends in views among union members.
Membership retention/internal organizing/associate membership polls.
Polls regarding the political views and voting behavior of persons residing in union households.
Polls of the general voting public regarding labor's image and the public's view of legislative or regulatory issues important to organized labor.
Polls of consumers to determine the most appropriate means to encourage purchase of union made products and services.

We are a unionized organization (UFCW Local 400). We are also a vertically integrated organization. All aspects of a study, including questionnaire design; interviewing; coding of verbatim responses; data tabulation; analysis; and, report writing are conducted in-house. Many polling organizations contract out one or more segments of a study. We believe that our approach provides for better quality control, more accurate results and assurance of confidentiality. Our variety of capabilities allows us to provide direct input at all stages of the process from focus groups to training sessions. The Wilson Center has 6 full-time salaried staff and 68 part-time hourly employees.