Gallup research

The reports on Gallup.com use charts and graphs sparingly to emphasize their points and reiterate percentages and facts given in the text. This gives them an easy way to communicate ideas to the readers quickly if the readers don’t have the time or patience to read through the entire article. The graphs generally aren’t text-wrapped, so they cut off the text in the middle of the article and you are forced to look at them, which may have been intentional on Gallup’s part. However, the graphs never cut off a paragraph in the middle and are instead between relevant paragraphs or sections.

In general numbers are included in the normal paragraph form. I don’t find this to be the most effective method of relating the information because there are so many numbers all at once that it gets overwhelming and I end up remembering nothing about them. For example, in one article about rate of suffering in Iran, it said:

The percentage of people suffering in Iran is in the higher range of what Gallup found worldwide in 2010, and on par with levels seen last year in Haiti (27%), Central African Republic (26%), and Cambodia (23%) and this year in Greece (25%). Additionally, 55% of Iranians are struggling, while 20% are thriving. When Gallup first measured wellbeing globally in 2005, 12% in Iran were suffering, while 64% were struggling and 24% were thriving.

In this paragraph specifically, so many numbers are presented that it is nearly impossible to remember them well. It may have been a better idea to present the information, or just to reinforce it, using a graph, because it is clearly an important point for the article to make.

They report the methods for gathering information in its own section at the end of the article. In one article about the rate of uninsured youth in America, the information was in a gray box with faded text at the end of the article. It appeared as though this was a ploy to get readers to skip the information, and possibly goes to show that they felt their own report methods were sketchy or inconsistent. However, their reporting of their methods was thorough and from what I could tell included all possible margins of error and any questions that someone may have had about their research methods.