Description

Non-governmental organization “Levada Analytical Center”/ “Levada-Center” was established in 2002. Today it is one of the largest full-service agencies carrying out public opinion and market research.
The key personnel are the founders of the company who came from the former All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM). In Levada Center they continue the research programs started in it.

Levada-Center researchers have considerable experience in sociology, economy, psychology, and marketing.

· about 80 staff in the Moscow office

· about 80 fieldwork supervisors in the regional offices

· about 3 000 trained interviewers.

All surveys are co-ordinated by experienced project managers.

In 1992-95, the key personnel was trained within the framework of the EC TACIS programme by:

· GALLUP A/S (Denmark)

· AGB INTOMART (Netherlands)

· MARKET BEHAVIOUR LTD. (UK)

· PULSE TRAIN TECHNOLOGY LTD. (UK).

Levada Center specialists were trained at the Michigan University of Ann Arbor in:

· sampling

· questionnaire design

· statistical analysis and other analytical techniques.

In its work, Levada-Center always follows the principles of scientific objectiveness and rigorously observes the rules of the ethical code of ESOMAR.
Leading staff members of the Centre are ESOMAR, and WAPOR members.
Levada-Center is part of Intersearch network of independent companies operating worldwide.

Levada-Center conducts surveys in such areas as:

· markets of goods and services

· consumer behaviour

· standard of living (indices IPN and ISN)

· political attitudes: elections, trust in government institutions

· education

· culture

· foreign relations, etc.

In the area of marketing research Levada-Center studies consumer preferences (U&A), conducts product, packaging and advertising tests, diary studies, retail audit, brand monitoring based on in-hall tests, point of sale and in-home interviewing as well as other methods used in research practice.

The regional network of 37 affiliated research centers and supervisors in Russia and the 15 affiliated companies in other ex-Soviet republics enables Levada-Center to conduct fieldwork all over Russia and in the former Soviet Union.
Regional offices are located in the following cities:St.-Petersburg, Kaliningrad, Arkhangelsk, Moscow, Smolensk, Ryazan, Vladimir, Yaroslavl, Tula, Kaluga, Kursk, Voronezh, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan, Samara, Saratov, Volgograd, Ulianovsk, Rostov-on-Don, Krasnodar, Stavropol, Perm, Yekaterinburg, Izhevsk, Ufa, Orenburg, Barnaul, Kemerovo, Novosibirsk, Omsk, Tjumen, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Ulan-Ude, Blagoveschensk, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok.

Research can also be conducted in:

Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan.

Jointly with the interdisciplinary academic centre of social sciences (Intercentre), Levada-Centre publishes the journal “Vestnik obschestvennogo mneniya” (“Public Opinion Bulletin”).

Fieldwork

The staff of the Moscow Fieldwork Department and considerable part of the regional supervisors were trained in GALLUP Denmark (1994), in the series of seminars financed on the TACIS program, 1994-1995, and at the summer school in Moscow in June 1997. The interviewer force of Levada-Center consists mostly of women (90%) aged 25-55 years old with high education (65%), taking part in polls and other surveys on a regular basis. The interviewers recruited for a survey are trained in regional offices of Levada-Center with the help of the manuals used by ISR, Ann Arbor (Self-Instructional Workbook for Telephone and Personal Interview Training). For each survey a full set of manuals is provided for interviewers and regional supervisors followed by a telephone briefing. Levada-Center has a team of full-time qualitative researchers, moderators and analysts, who work with different targets using a wide range of professional techniques. The projects could be conducted in most of the regions of Russia and of the ex-Soviet Union. The company’s network of regional offices provides a good quality of recruitment and managerial assistance.

The Moscow studio with facilities for viewing, videotaping, and simultaneous translation is located in the shopping area of downtown Moscow. Many regional offices also have studios with one-way mirror and adequate technical facilities.

Control procedures

About 10%-15% of sample is controlled by mail, telephone calls, and call-back visits. If any infringements in an interviewer‘s work are found, all interviews conducted by this interviewer are being checked by the call-back visits.
Minimum 20% of questionnaires from regional offices are visually checked by the Moscow Fieldwork Office.
Coding of open-ended questions is being done in the Moscow office.

Data entry and data processing

Row data punched in regional offices are sent to Moscow by Internet. Data cleaning, processing, and weighting are carried out in the Moscow office. The data entry and cleaning are done with a tailor-made software. To check data entry double-punching is used, if necessary. All data is checked for missing data, “wild” codes, and logic inconsistence. Data files are provided in ASCII and in SPSS formats.