Compared to other German opinion and market research institutes, the Allensbach Institute is medium-sized, having elected to limit its size to about 100 regular staff members. The Allensbach Institute has one of the largest field organizations for face-to-face interviews in Germany, with a total of about 1,600 trained interviewers throughout the country. The Institute conducts an average of about 100 studies with a total of 80,000 - 90,000 interviews annually, whereby the main emphasis is placed on face-to-face interviews.
The extensive and carefully maintained Allensbach Archives are one of the Institute's special features. Here, all surveys, reports and studies by the Institute are stored, thus enabling us to quickly obtain an overview of current research findings and to connect these with the findings of long-term trend investigations, some of which have been conducted for decades. The most important findings are documented regularly in the Allensbach yearbooks (Allensbacher Jahrbücher der Demoskopie); the most recent volume in the series is the Allensbacher Jahrbuch der Demoskopie 2003 – 2009: Die Berliner Republik. The Allensbach Institute is the only German survey research institute that has a cooperation agreement with the German Federal Archives in Koblenz, where a complete copy of all documents from the Allensbach Archives is stored.
Another unique department at the Allensbach Institute is our "Questionnaire Conference." All questions posed by the Allensbach Institute are developed jointly by the questionnaire conference staff, thus ensuring that the question wordings do not reflect the perspective of any single individual or the client commissioning the survey, but are instead formulated in an unbiased and easily comprehensible way. When constructing questionnaires, the Institute can refer to a database comprising about 140,000 questions that have been posed by the Institute since it was established.
The institute is directed by Prof. Renate Köcher. It is owned by the Allensbach Foundation for Survey Research (Stiftung Demoskopie Allensbach).
The Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach belongs to all of the major opinion and market research associations, such as...