Political polling has been under constant fire since 2012 when Mitt Romney’s pollster famously slipped on a banana peel of survey data and incorrectly predicted the former Massachusetts governor would oust incumbent Barack Obama. Donald Trump’s unforeseen victory in 2016 only increased pressure on the status quo for the political polling industry.

So if we look over the fence, how does the rest of the world conduct research? The GreenBook Research Industry Trends (GRIT) Report gives us some insights.

Among emerging research techniques, a majority of vendors and clients are using:

1. Mobile surveys (75%)
2. Online communities (59%)
3. Social media analytics (52%)

Among traditional quantitative methods, they rank the following as techniques they used the most:

1. Online surveys
2. Mobile surveys
3. Computer-assistend telephone interviews (autodials)
4. Computer Assisted Personal Interviewing (basically face-to-face w/ a tablet instead of a clipboard)
5. Face-to-face

For traditional qualitative methods, most are using:

1. In person focus groups
2. In person in-depth interviews
3. Online focus groups
4. Online focus groups w/ webcams
5. Telephone in-depth interviews

The full report can be downloaded here with free registration.

Checkout a full infographic from the report below: