Collection details

The Arab Barometer Public Opinion Survey Series reflects multi-country social surveys designed to assess citizen attitudes about public affairs, governance, and social policy in the Arab World, and to identify factors that shape the public's attitudes and values.

The Arab Barometer was established in 2005 by scholars in the Arab world and the United States. Leadership was initially provided by the University of Michigan and Princeton University in the U.S. and by universities and research centers in Jordan, Palestine, Morocco, Algeria and Kuwait. In 2010, a partnership was formed with the Arab Reform Initiative (ARI) in order to expand the project's scope and range of activities, building off ARI's regional survey work carried out in 2006-2008. The Arab Barometer was developed in consultation with the Global Barometer project; a network composed of regional barometers in Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, East Asia, and South Asia.

The first wave of the Arab Barometer began in 2006/07 with the first round of surveys administered in seven countries. An eighth country was surveyed in 2009. Funded by the Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Arab Barometer broke new ground in a region where systematic and rigorous politically-focused public opinion research had been extremely rare. The surveys drew on the most advanced scientific expertise in the region and were co-directed by Arab and American specialists with a firm understanding of the Arab world. The eight countries included in the first round of the Arab Barometer are Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, Bahrain, Algeria, Kuwait, Lebanon, and Yemen. All of the first wave surveys involved face-to-face interviews, and all used multi-stage area probability sampling to select respondents. Quotas were used in the final stage for Algeria and Kuwait. All respondents are eighteen years of age or older.

Additional information about the Arab Barometer surveys is available on the Arab Barometer Web site.

Studies

Variables

Variable-level information is unavailable for this series and is not available for some restricted datasets. If you need assistance, please get in touch with user support via email at ICPSR-help@umich.edu.