World Public Opinion is a website initiated and managed by Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). PIPA began in 1992 and is a joint programme of the Center on Policy Attitudes and the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland. PIPA conducts studies on public opinion about international issues based on a variety of sources, such as polls, focus groups and interviews. In addition, the WorldPublicOpinion.org network is a consortium of research centres around the global who study public opinion on international issues in their respective countries. The website is an international collaborative effort which provides a venue for public opinion on international issues. “WorldPublicOpinion.org seeks to reveal the values and views of publics in specific nations around the world as well as global patterns of world public opinion”.
The staff credited on the website include Dr Steven Kull, who is the Director of PIPA and Senior Researcher Scholar the Center for International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland as well as Dr Clay Ramsay, co-founder and Director of Research at PIPA who is also a Senior Researcher Scholar the Center for International and Security Studies at Maryland. The list of PIPA Board of Advisors is noted on the website.
The left sidebar of the website is titled Explore World Opinion and is divided into categories first by region and then again by topic. After selecting a category, titles of articles related to the category are presented in newest date order. In the region category, there might be as few as five articles or as many as 119. Alternatively, the articles can be located by topic such a Development/Aid, Environment or Justice/Humans Rights. There are approximately 335 articles freely available on the website. There is also a search box available in the upper right corner of the website. A user must initiate a search to get to the advanced searching features, like matching case, regular expression searching or specifying time period. The search engine supports Boolean operators. It does search the full content of the articles. The result set can be sorted by title or date authored in descending or ascending order. Users may also control how many results are shown per page. Upon selecting a title of an article, the full text of the article is shown and is available for printing or emailing. The article may also be shared on a variety of platforms including del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Newsvine, StumbleUpon and Twitter. Frequently articles include a separate pdf of the questionnaire, results and methodology used in the study and/or links to poll results. Charts and graphs are also shown in many of the articles. Titles to other related studies are shown in the upper corner of the article.
Below By Region and By Topic on the left sidebar, there are additional options. The Digests option provides separate world and US opinion analyses based on integrating polls and other sources. This collection of material is developed at the Council of Foreign Relations, which is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher founded in (1921). The content of the material is much longer in length and is divided into chapters. This material is available for downloading or printing in the pdf format. The chapters are accessed for both the US public opinion view and world public opinion view by topic. Examples of topic categories here include Terrorism, Energy Security and Nuclear Proliferation. Lastly, on the Digests page is a section called Americans and the World. The eight links under this section, four under global issues and three under regional issues takes the user to a different website address at www.americans-world.org. This site still has the WorldPublicOpinion.org banner at the top. This website is also provided by PIPA and focuses on US public opinion with shorter article similar to the ones on the www.worldpublicopinon.org site.
The last option on the left side bar is called Organization Links. Under this category are pages that provide links to World Public Opinion’s partnering organizations, but potentially more valuable are links to websites of polling sources from around global such a Eurobarometer, Latinobarometer, Iranian Students Polling Agency and World Values Survey. The last link under Organization Links is to PIPA’s digital repository at the University of Maryland, which provides more reports and includes questionnaires and the resulting statistical files in SPSS and Microsoft Excel formats.
Along the top of the website below the banner is basic information about the website, the publisher and the staff, frequently asked questions about their privacy and use policies, where to direct media inquiries and contact information. This site is also available in Chinese, although it may not be as current as the English version.
While at first this website does not appear to provide much value, it has a surprising amount of content presented in a straightforward manner. Containing 335 shorter articles, complete chapters outlining both the US and world public opinion on a variety of issues from the Council of Foreign Relations, links to more content and articles at www.americans-world.org and the PIPA digital repository of data, World Public Opinion provides significant amount of information. Additionally, the list of global polling source websites could be invaluable to a researcher. This website does have a narrow audience, specifically people interested in public opinion on international issues and how that relates to foreign policy, but those needing this type of information should find this to be a very sound resource of high-quality information.
