Survey Sponsor

The sponsor of a survey is responsible for funding part or all of the sampling and data collection activities and typically has first or exclusive rights to the data. Often, survey sponsors do not have the in-house capacity (i.e. facilities or interviewing staff) to administer a survey and, as a result, contract these data collection activities to a third party. These third-party organizations focus on survey administration, such as selecting the sample, interviewing and distributing questionnaires, and data entry and analyses. Sometimes these third parties (i.e. survey research firms) are asked to provide expertise in questionnaire design and data analysis and asked to draft an analytic report. These contracted services do not negate the survey sponsor's exclusive (or first) rights to the survey data. Typically, ...