Blitz-survey is a variant of a face-to-face interview. The blitz-survey technique is mostly used for surveys with short questionnaires (up to 25-30 simple questions, or interviews lasting for up to 10-12 minutes). These surveys are conducted in big cities (with the population of 100 thousand +) or city districts to define the sentiments of the residents/consumers in a given city/district or in certain retail outlets in order to obtain information about the people who come to shop there, about their preferences and attitudes.
In conducting a blitz-survey among the population of a city/region the sample is constructed by a systematic random selection from the micro-districts/electoral districts in this city/district.
ONLY RESIDENTS OF THE MICRO-DISTRICT in the area of the survey are interviewed.
To avoid bias in the sample of the universe of the region, sex and age quotas as well as sex and education quotas are used.
As the practice of conducting blitz-surveys in Moscow and other cities in Russia shows, the quality of the sample constructed by the method described above meets the requirements of sociological surveys and the results obtained closely correlate with the results of telephone and face-to-face interviews.
The use of this technique allowed Levada-Centre specialists to forecast the results of parliamentary and presidential elections in Moscow and a number of other cities in Russia within the accuracy of the statistical error.