whether or not you trust these things to accurately reflect public opinion (let's face it, who does?), what's nice to see is that most of the responses reveal
some improvement over the last six to twelve months. especially the questions about peoples' expectations for the future of the country - there seems to be faith in the ability of those in charge to hold Iraq together, and little support for breaking it up (except among the Kurds, but they've always been a bit antisocial apparently).
there are a few odd ones though. Part of question 9 asks people how they rate their own family's economic situation - over twice as many people rated it 'very good' now as did in August of last year. then again, 10% thought unemployment was Iraq's biggest problem. from what i can tell the problems most people are complaining about are fairly humdrum things (well, i suppose access to clean water is important for health reasons, but you see what i mean) rather than security-related and political problems. it seems to be mainly poor provision of electricity and water that are riling people. Q12b estimates 82% are either 'somewhat confident' or 'very confident' the security situation will 'continue to improve'.
there's also growing faith in the army and the government, although not much improvement in peoples' estimations of the police. US occupation forces come out badly, with 20% of those who thought security was getting worse holding them to blame. what really is good news, i suppose, is a fall in support for local militias.
ok enough for now, but it makes quite interesting reading i think. we might accuse them of cooking the results, but it's been performed by independent private agencies at the bequest of major national news agencies - the BBC, Japan's NHK and Germany's ARD - which all have fairly good reputations for unbiased reporting. if it does come out sounding a bit TOO optimistic, i would guess that's because it's aggregated over the whole of Iraq, whilst the major incidents we hear about every week take place in a few urban hotspots.
PS the survey was done based on interviews (in Arabic or Kurdish) conducted over the course of a week in February. they interviewed 2228 people, which sounds like a smallish sample to me, but i suppose they know what they're doing.
here's their precise methodology for anyone bored enough:
Methodology:
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]461 sampling points were distributed proportionate to population size in each of Iraqs 18 provinces, then in all 102 districts within the provinces, then by simple random sampling among Iraqs nearly 11,000 villages or neighbourhoods, with urban/rural stratification at each stage. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]Maps or grids were used to select random starting points within each sampling point, with household selection by random route/random interval and within-household selection by the "next-birthday" method. An average of five interviews were conducted per sampling point. . [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]Interviews were conducted by 116 trained Iraqi interviewers with 31 supervisors. Fifty-seven percent of interviews were supervised or reviewed by supervisors [/FONT][FONT=Tahoma,Tahoma] [/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]34 percent by direct [/FONT][FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]observation, 7 percent by revisits and 16 percent by phone. All questionnaires were subject to further quality-control checks. Seven of the 461 sampling points were inaccessible for security reasons and were substituted with randomly selected replacements (hmmmm)[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]In addition to the national sample, oversamples were drawn in Anbar province, Sadr City, Basra city, Kirkuk city and Mosul 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. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman,Times New Roman]
The survey had a contact rate of 92 percent and a cooperation rate of 65 percent for a net response rate of 60 percent. Including an estimated design effect of 1.52, the results have a margin of sampling error of 2.5 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level. [/FONT]
