This paper is one of the first academic endeavors to systematically explore, define, and compare the major challenges and factors affecting the integrity of public opinion research across the Arab region. This paper outlines the challenges and shortcomings in the study of Arab public opinion using two methods of data collection; pilot surveys examining limits to collecting public opinion data as perceived by participants, and field experiences of six years conducting Arab public opinion surveys with more than 50,000 individuals in more than 14 Arab countries. As pilot surveys have the same limitations as public opinion research, information on the challenges and shortcomings of this field of study cannot be fully obtained through collecting data from participants alone. Therefore, the present research paper uses both pilot surveys and first-hand field experience to provide a comparative analysis of the challenge and shortcomings of conducting public opinion surveys in the Arab world. While pilot surveys show reservations among participants in responding to some issues and wordings, field experiences demonstrate continuously changing challenges to the study of public opinion as well as significant differences among Arab countries. In this paper, the main challenges are categorized into structural, political, cultural, and religious. For example, as there is no well-established tradition of conducting opinion polls on substantive and sensitive issues in the Arab region, respondents often need assurance that their answers would not pose risks to their lives and status. Such obstacles are exacerbated by security conditions, where some governments have officials shadow researchers. Other challenges include sampling errors and bias. For example, segments of Arab populations who have extreme views tend to refuse participation in polls, leading to self-selection bias or non-response bias. In a similar fashion and due to contentious politics, certain populations are politically motivated to deliberately alter the outcomes of surveys by giving false responses, causing response bias. Conflicts also limit access to affected populations, albeit large. In addition to common challenges, this research reveals vast difference among Arab countries. For example, some countries provide freedoms of expression that allow for more accurate responses in surveys, while others present severe risks for expressing certain political and religious views. Additionally, differences in perceptions cause difficulties in comparability of results. For example, understanding conceptions of democracy in countries without democratic tradition differs greatly from surveying people with experience in democratic processes. The same applies to differing perceptions in sectarian and polarized contexts.

The past decade has witnessed a marked expansion in the number and scope of opinion surveys being conducted in the Arab world generally, and in the Gulf region specifically. This burgeoning use of survey methods in the Gulf owes to a confluence of factors, including improved institutional capacity; a more permissive regulatory environment; the proliferation of commercial survey research firms; practical restrictions on conducting surveys elsewhere in the Arab world due to continuing political instability; and an increased desire among decisionmakers and analysts to gauge popular attitudes and understand citizen and resident behavior related to important public policy matters. Yet, even as their frequency and scope increase, questions remain about the impact of this quite recent introduction of social scientific, health, and other surveys into a new social and cultural environment. How do Arab and Gulf Arab citizens perceive their own participation in survey research, as well as the practical results that stem from it? Are surveys viewed as a public benefit, or as burdensome and intrusive? Do these surveys serve as a reference point when Gulf publics think about popular opinion and trends in culture, health, and other domains, or are their findings largely unknown or ignored? Finally, which individual-level factors – demographic, socioeconomic, attitudinal, or experiential – help explain differences in individual orientations toward surveys? To begin to answer these and related questions, we collect original data via nationally representative telephone and face-to-face interviews on exposure to and orientations toward surveys and survey-taking among citizens and foreign residents of the Gulf state of Qatar. We assess survey attitudes using the validated Survey Attitude Scale of De Leeuw et al. (2010), enabling both within-country cross-cultural comparison and cross-national comparison. In addition, the study includes two embedded experiments designed to understand, respectively, the factors that influence willingness to participate in surveys, including length, mode, topic, and sponsorship (Gordoni and Schmidt 2010; Corstange 2014); as well as the practical impacts of survey attitudes and perceived survey burden on survey-taking itself, especially early termination and data falsification. Beyond their scholarly contributions, all results have important implications for data quality in survey-based research conducted in the region. To our knowledge, this study represents the first systematic assessment of experience with and attitudes toward surveys in an Arab country.

Many recent discussions of public opinion in the Middle East debate the existence and or power of the ‘Arab Street.’ Increasing numbers of studies report from the results of surveys from the region on a variety of topics. Often lost in these discussions, however, is how people in the region actually conceptualize the notion of public opinion. Most Western definitions of public opinion focus on its aggregate nature that is best accessed by survey research. This conception, however, has been challenged from a number of perspectives. Some would see that social pressures create a spiral of silence to limit public expressions of opinions outside the mainstream majority. Others would argue that opinion is led by different active social groupings. This clash of pluralist ideas via contentious politics results in the formation of public attitudes. Other scholars focus not on public opinion but rather on the public sphere of discourse and dialogue through media studies. This notion of discourse is extended by some scholars to focus not on the attitudes of the public but how leaders use the rhetoric of ‘the public’ to justify their actions. Finally, some scholars would argue that public opinion simply does not exist outside the frameworks used to measure it. Studies of public opinion in the Middle East aimed at audiences in the region as well as those in the West have reflected this diversity of conceptualization of public opinion. In addition the study of public opinion and survey research are both challenged as being inappropriate the region. Be it for their transplanting of Western cultural assumptions into a foreign environment, as neo-colonial impositions, or as irrelevant non-attitudes warped by authoritarian states and societies. This study investigates how these different theoretical notions of public opinion find resonance among a Middle Eastern public. This paper analyzes the preliminary results from a new survey of respondents in Qatar on attitudes towards survey research and definitions of public opinion. This study is the first systematic investigation of participation in, and attitudes toward, survey research in Qatar. It gathers reliable and previously-unavailable data on the extent of survey usage in the country, as well as gauge the impact of social scientific research in a cultural context far removed from its Western origins. In so doing, it contributes to scholarly debates surrounding the origins of survey attitudes and public opinion formation.

Arab public opinion research has grown significantly within the last decade thanks to the increasing number of public opinion surveys. While this trend has provided important insights for understanding the perceptions of Arab publics, numerous questions remain about the conceptual validity of items used in the Arab opinion polls. The lack of uniformity in survey methodologies, item incompatibility, and contextual differences are some of the issues casting doubt on the findings of social scientific research using Arab public opinion polls. In this paper, we aim to address the problems of contextual differences and conceptual validity of survey questions by introducing a novel conceptualization religiosity. Much of the existing literature examining public opinion surveys in the Middle East have addressed the question of how religiosity influences political attitudes. The country of origin for the participants have been taken into account in some studies as a dummy variable or through examining these variables within country. Although these studies have importantly contributed to an understanding of the complexity of religiosity and regime preferences, few studies have attempted to investigate patterns of preference across countries based on the domestic political context and the existing regime’s approach toward religious practices and identities in the public sphere. This problem is exacerbated by the assumption that there is little cross-country variability in the reception of the items measuring religiosity. We propose a conceptual model to assuage some concerns related to cross-country comparability of religiosity as a predictor variable across 12 Arab societies. Utilizing multiple waves of Arab public opinion surveys and using latent class analysis along with a more nuanced measurement of “religious classes” that might populate a domestic context, we intend to show that orientations toward politics by those identifying as religious are distributed in patterns that can be predicted by their existing regime type and its practices toward religious faithful. While regimes with a fairly liberal public sphere in regard to religious practice show a more normal distribution among religious classes and preferences, regimes with stricter control on the public sphere have a different pattern of distribution befitting the political context within which its devout citizens live. Thus, some of the variability in previous studies concerning the measurement religiosity can be attributed to the national context. This paper contributes to the emerging literature about the validity and cross-national comparability of public opinion surveys in Arab societies by introducing a novel conceptual model and context-dependent measurement strategies.