Filtering & Weighting a Question's Data

Filtering and weighting your data allows you to limit what you see to only those responses that are relevant to your research needs.

As a media partner, whenever you search for a question and view the responses, you're seeing them in the context of your audience. 

There are only 5,000 responses showing up for this particular question from May 2018 to January 2023. To filter or weight it, we would click on the button at the upper right labeled Filter or Weight this Data. We would then see this screen.

We can choose to filter by Network, Segment, Target, Date, or Weighting Scheme. We can also choose whether we want the settings we choose remembered, which is convenient when you're looking at various questions and want the same settings for all of them.

My Account represents your audience. You can change it to the entire CivicScience Network or the Benchmark Network, which is the general population.


These are the segments to which this particular media partner has access. You can create new segments, but it's very likely that the one you want already exists, so please consult your account manager before doing so.


This media partner has four targets, or sites: one with an in-article instance of the poll unit, a poll on their home page, a news hub poll, and their main target, which is an in-article instance of the poll unit. If we filter by one of these, we'll only see the results from that particular site.

Here, we can choose to see the responses in the last 7 days, the last 30 days, the last 90 days, the last 180 days, the last 365 days, or a custom fixed or relative date range.

We can also choose a weighting scheme. You should always weight CivicScience data. Our system has many, many weighting schemes, but they aren't shown here. If you need access to other schemes, please let your account manager know.

I've chosen to filter by the benchmark network and used the U.S. Census weighting scheme. As you can see, now there are more than 500,000 results. 

This video explains how a media partner might filter and weight a question.