Strength In Numbers is looking for smart survey research assistants

Note: Not a full-time job, but I will pay you — probably best for a smart undergrad or grad student or side hustle-r

This is an open job, and I’m evaluating applications on a rolling basis. I’m always looking for talented people to help me improve Strength In Numbers. If you know someone this might be relevant to, please send it to them.

The current status for this job is: Hiring.

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I’m looking to make my first public part-time hire(s) here at Strength In Numbers. While there are a lot of things that need doing by a professional (copy-editing and fact-checking are also high on my list), the thing the business would really benefit from is someone who loves to analyze raw polling data, make charts, and find interesting stories in the crosstabs.

The basic idea motivating this hire is that, through our regular Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls, I have accumulated a lot of survey data that no doubt has a lot of stories hiding just under the surface, but I don’t have enough time to dig all of them up. I want to make the most use of this data as possible, and bringing on another person (or maybe a couple, if the applicant pool is stellar) is a good bet for the business. Also, I want SIN to do its part in giving back to the community.

While I unfortunately cannot make this a full-time role at this moment, I do plan to pay a nice hourly rate of around $50 to an applicant who can think up topical questions to answer with this data, run their own survey crosstabs and regression models, and produce output data for me to analyze and write up. Bonus points if you can write up your own articles in clean copy, though that’s not required (and this is not going to be a frequent source of bylines for you).

The best person for this role is probably a social science graduate student who wants some extra income, a freelance data scientist looking for a fun side project, etc.

If you think you could have conducted the data analysis for any of these three articles, given a raw survey data file, and have at least 90% of the skills listed below, please email me at contact[AT]gelliottmorris[DOT]com with the subject line “Survey research job” and a resume. (This is very important. If you do not include the words “survey research job” in your application, my email will filter it away into the abyss.)

Elliott

Overview of duties

• Running analyses of raw survey data, including…

  • Calculating your own toplines and crosstabs

  • Making charts of results

  • Writing concise memos (or maybe even articles) of your findings

• Suggesting questions to run for future SIN/Verasight surveys

• Communicating in a timely fashion

Required skills

• Bachelor’s degree in political science, economics, statistics, or a related field

• Basic understanding of public opinion research and U.S. political polling conventions (likely voter screens, question wording effects, etc.)

• You regularly read U.S. political news and keep up with ongoing news and discourses about polling and elections

• Knows how to import survey data in the R statistical language and can run weighted toplines and crosstabs (extra credit: with multiple interactions)

• Comfortable working with GitHub

• Can run regression analysis on survey data (knows what regularization is)

• Comfortable producing publication-ready charts in R (ggplot2 preferred)

• Familiarity with survey weighting and design effects

• Can interpret and communicate findings from subgroup analysis without overstating precision

• Can work asynchronously with minimal direction — this is a part-time remote gig where I’m giving you datasets and asking you to find something interesting to write about. You need to be a self-starter.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience with MRP or other small-area estimation techniques

• Knowledge of making charts with the online program datawrapper

• Can write clean, concise copy summarizing analytical findings

• Familiarity with the current U.S. polling landscape (knows the major firms, methodological debates, etc.)

• Past experience writing questions for a survey

• Past experience working with open-ended survey responses

• Knowledge of using AI tools such as Claude to assist with programming tasks, e.g., coding of open-ended questions, or reviewing your own code

• Can work in Slack

• You’re the type of person who would stay up til 11:00 at night watching results come in

This role is remote and asynchronous. Hours are flexible — I care about output, not when you’re online. Expect somewhere in the range of 20-30 hours per month, depending on the news cycle and when we’re fielding new polls.