Methodology
Published Verasight source reports are the canonical record. The Data Library presents key findings from them.
Vocabulary
The editorial primitives
| Category | The top-level grouping: AI & Tech, Money & Finance, Politics, Health, Culture, Sports. An editorial taxonomy on top of the data, not a Verasight module name. |
|---|---|
| Featured topic | A curated narrative built from multiple supporting questions in one or more waves. The main editorial unit on site. |
| Indexed question | A canonical question not absorbed into a published featured topic. It stays browseable and searchable on its own, lighter page. |
| Supporting data | Underlying questions, crosstabs, methodology notes, and source-report links that justify a featured topic's story, charts, and layout. |
Pipeline
Six stages from raw wave to canonical library
| 01 · Ingest | Raw Verasight files (.sav, .csv, .dta, .rds, .xlsx) become long-format tables with metadata sidecars. |
|---|---|
| 02 · Normalize | Null handling, PII scrub, demographic normalization, and respondent context propagation. |
| 03 · Weight | Row-level weight validation and reusable weighted summaries. |
| 04 · Crosstab | Banner and demographic breakdowns with low-N flags and canonical dimension names. |
| 05 · Enrich | Questions package into a wave-scoped bundle with toplines, crosstabs, methodology, citation, and slug. |
| 06 · Emit | Canonical question JSON, per-question CSV, per-wave summary, and a site-wide index. |
Each stage owns one job and writes a checkable artifact; a failure halts the run with a descriptive error. Curation happens after, on committed artifacts, and always passes human review.
Publication
How canonical data becomes a published page
| Canonical layer | One JSON and one CSV per question, plus a per-wave summary and a site-wide index. Stable contract, regenerable from raw inputs. |
|---|---|
| Curation layer | Category mappings, topic proposals, and curated featured topics commit on top of the canonical layer as tracked artifacts. |
| Publication layer | The site reads committed artifacts. Published featured topics drive the home, category, and search surfaces. |
A question absorbed into a published featured topic never duplicates as a standalone page — indexed-question pages are exactly the questions not absorbed.
Sources
The canonical source is the report
| Canonical destination | reports.verasight.io is the canonical hub. Each page links to its verified report; older reports may remain on legacy hosts. |
|---|---|
| Question-level citation | Verified question anchors where the source report supports them; report-granularity waves link to the report root; unpublished sources remain visibly pending and unlinked. |
| Raw data on site | V1 does not surface raw downloads on site. Per-question CSVs are emitted by the pipeline and remain a future on-site surface. |
| Transparency | Field methodology and weighting design are attributed to Verasight upstream in each source report. |
Citations
Citing the data library
Every topic and question page includes a copy-ready citation naming the survey, field dates, unweighted base, and margin of error. The standard format:
| llms.txt | Root-level index for LLM crawlers. |
|---|---|
| .md mirrors | Every page has a markdown mirror for clean machine citation. |
| JSON-LD | Dataset and FAQPage schema on relevant pages. |
| robots.txt | Allow-all. The library wants to be cited. |
Verasight [survey name], fielded [dates], N=[base] US adults age 18+, +/- [margin of error].
Upstream
How we collect data
Every finding in the Data Library comes from a survey fielded on the Verasight panel. Panelists are recruited through random address-based sampling, random person-to-person text messaging, and dynamic online targeting. We do not use opt-in river samples, and every respondent is verified before joining the panel.
Weighting
Weighting and estimates
Results are weighted to benchmarks for the U.S. adult population from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey, covering age, gender, race and ethnicity, education, and region, plus partisanship. Reported margins of error reflect a 95% confidence interval and account for the design effect of weighting.
Fields
What every page reports
| Mode | How the survey was administered and how respondents were recruited |
|---|---|
| Population | The population the estimate represents, e.g. US adults age 18+ |
| Field dates | The dates the survey was in the field |
| Base (unweighted) | The unweighted number of respondents asked the question |
| Margin of error | The 95% confidence interval for full-sample estimates |
| Weight variable | The survey weight applied to all reported estimates |
| Module | The omnibus module (respondent subset) the question was asked in |
Transparency
Transparency
Verasight is a member of the AAPOR Transparency Initiative. Full question wording, topline results, and methodology reports for every survey in the library are published at reports.verasight.io.
Open Verasight reports ↗