Civey

Civey GmbH
legal form	Company with limited liability
founding	2015
Seat	Berlin , Germany
management	Gerrit Richter ; Janina cap
Number of employees	over 40
Branch	Opinion polling
Website	civey.com

The Civey GmbH is a German start-up company based in Berlin , under the name Civey performs opinion polls regularly find a wide media publicity.

The data for the surveys are only collected online, with the survey participants recruiting themselves. The company states that the survey results are nevertheless representative of the general population. Because of this claim and the methodology used, the company is criticized in empirical social research .

Companies

The company was founded in 2015 by Gerrit Richter, former political advisor and speaker at Hans Eichel , with four colleagues under the company OMNI TT GmbH . The Investitionsbank Berlin made start-up capital of 1.7 million euros available. In January 2017 the name was changed to Civey GmbH . The name is from the English Citizen Survey , which translates Bürgerumfrage means derived. Since November 2018, the company has had an advisory board that includes former Federal Minister Brigitte Zypries and scientists Jörg-Müller Lietzkow and Anselm Rink. Tagesspiegel publisher Sebastian Turner , according to his own statements, invested privately in Civey for the first time in 2018 and now holds just over half of the shares after a capital increase in August 2019 via an investment company.

Civey surveys are published on numerous websites, from where anyone can take part in them (technical term: "self-recruiting"). One of the German websites with the greatest reach , Spiegel Online , has Civey determine the Sunday question , the so-called SPON election trend . The numerous other media that cooperate with Civey include, for example, Focus Online , Die Welt and the public television broadcasters Bayerischer Rundfunk and Phoenix . With the exception of bild.de, Civey content is represented on all news websites that are most visited in Germany .

There has been close cooperation from the start with Tagesspiegel , for which Civey regularly creates the political Berlin monitor and whose publisher is now the dominant shareholder ( see above ).

On the other hand, hardly any results from Civey surveys can be found on websites and portals that deal with representative electoral research. The page Wahlrecht.de, for example, does not list Civey's surveys. The results for the Sunday question on the federal election of all other survey institutes, however, are shown on the page, including those from YouGov , which raised such a Sunday question for the first time in May 2017.

methodology

According to its own information, Civey collects the results for its surveys exclusively online. Companies like Opinary only collect online surveys, but do not deny that they are not representative. Unlike YouGov, which randomly draws the participants in a survey from a manually supervised online panel , with Civey surveys anyone can vote and the results are displayed immediately.

According to Civey, the polls are spread over a large number of websites, the so-called "river sampling". The company itself speaks of a "network of 25,000 websites" on which the survey widgets are placed, which, however, means the number of subpages (URLs). So essentially it's the number of article pages. The number of websites that have included Civey surveys is not communicated publicly. In every survey, after answering the first question about age, gender and postcode of the respective user is asked. Together with a set cookie , a user is then already considered "registered", even without specifying an e-mail address, which is also possible later. The result of the first answered question is then displayed immediately. The user then has the option of answering any number of other surveys, and the survey results are also displayed immediately. Some of the questions are not conventional surveys, but aim to gain further data about the user for later weighting. So z. B. Questions about income or marital status.

So that the results are presumably representative, the company weights the data collected in this way on the basis of basic variables for which the actual distribution in the population is known, such as age, gender or zip code. The opinions of the participants are therefore given different voting weights, so that the answers to the basic variables asked at the same time in each survey correspond approximately to the basic data of the total population. This takes place under the controversial hypothesis that the unknown variables (i.e. the actual survey responses) should then also correspond to those of the population as a whole, given the same weighting, and any distortions that may arise, for example, through self-recruitment, disappear. Apart from the peculiarity of online self-recruitment, it is in fact a typical quota sample , which for its part has been discussed controversially in the social sciences for decades.

In May 2019, Civey managing director Gerrit Richter was asked in an interview that the proportion of AfD sympathizers among participants in certain surveys on political statements was very high, whereupon Richter replied that "in recent years the right-wing conservative spectrum has managed to mobilize online. Of course they try to manipulate surveys. ”The decisive question is whether“ this bias can be determined and removed with statistical methods. ”Civey is doing this successfully, according to Richter.

criticism

With increasing awareness, Civey finds himself exposed to criticism, which mostly aims at the fact that the survey results, contrary to what is claimed, are actually not representative.

Method criticism by well-known scientists

Rainer Schnell , Professor of Empirical Social Research at the University of Duisburg-Essen , describes the Civey method as an "arbitrary sample". The self-selection is also so serious that you can “no longer correct it”. “We have known since 1975 at the latest that volunteers are different from non-volunteers in many dimensions,” says Schnell.
Jörg Blasius , professor at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology in Bonn, found various mathematical and content-related errors in Civey. In his opinion, the method is “far from being representative”.
Gerd Bosbach , professor of statistics at the Koblenz University of Applied Sciences, told Deutschlandfunk about Civey surveys : “People who register there make a lot of effort. It is important to them that their opinion has an influence. And that's a very small part of the population. So in that respect it is not representative from the perspective. "
Helmut Jung, former President of ESOMAR : “In view of the density of the Internet, the representativeness (depends) not on the online survey method, but on the type of recruitment. Until the Civey method is fully disclosed, there are more than considerable doubts. "
Ulrich Kohler, Professor of Methods in Empirical Social Research at the University of Potsdam , wrote in an open letter at the beginning of August 2019 based on the results of a Civey survey on Berlin politics: “From a technical point of view, Civey surveys are an entertainment format. Civey's sample design is based on a random sample of respondents. The weighting method used is highly speculative and the exact method is not open to scientific criticism. The percentage values determined using the Civey method cannot claim to provide valid approximate values for “the Berliners”. You are a mirage! "
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Professor at the Mannheim Center for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim : "With surveys in which the respondents choose themselves, you cannot depict the opinion of the general population"
In November 2019, the Academy of Sociology publicly stated : “Of course, the results are only meaningful (for) the users of the respective services - and only with the restriction that only those who are particularly interested take part in the survey. Obviously, it is not possible to draw conclusions about the entire population or eligible voters from the results. "

Sham accuracy and other criticism

It is also criticized that the Civey surveys are often positioned in a “non-neutral environment”, which could lead to the respondents being manipulated. An example of this is surveys that ask about citizens' feelings of security, embedded in an article about a capital crime . Another point of criticism of Civey is that the company promises to produce “surveys in real time”, but there are examples in which Civey of the survey institutes was the one who recognized a demoscopic trend last, such as the so-called “Schulz hype “2017 or in the state election in Bavaria in 2018 . After all, Civey is also exposed to the classic criticism of sham accuracy, as the results are always given with an accuracy of 1/10 percent, which is unusual in surveys of other well-known institutes. "As if you could know exactly what the electorate tends to do," wrote the Süddeutsche Zeitung .

Complaint to the press council

In socio-political surveys, Civey often comes to completely different results than the "classic" opinion research companies that work with the telephone sample. This caused a stir because such drastic deviations were previously unknown in Germany. A survey from 2018 that asked whether Mesut Özil and Ilkay Gündogan should continue to appear in the national soccer team for Germany after a media appointment with Recep Tayyip Erdoğan should be highlighted, according to which, according to Civey, 80% answer "No", for one thing Forsa survey formulated differently , it was only 25% - a discrepancy that, according to critics, cannot be explained by statistical error tolerance, so that “at least one of the institutes is spreading nonsense” with these deviations. In response, Forsa, together with infas and the Wahlen research group , submitted a complaint to the press council , which, however, was directed against Focus online, which had published the survey. The complaint was unanimously rejected on the grounds that journalists (do not have to) have the appropriate competence to independently judge the representativeness or non-representativeness of surveys. The Working Group of German Market and Social Research Institutes (ADM), which had not actively supported the complaint from the press council, criticized its rejection because, if people were asked for their opinion on online sites, this sample could not reflect the opinion of the population. In addition, contrary to what Civey claims, such samples could not be made representative of the population through weighting. "You don't need any statistical training to get this knowledge," said ADM CEO Bernd Wachter.

Allegations of fraud and fraud

In addition to the public criticism of the method by recognized scientists, Civey is also exposed to the fraud allegation of copying survey figures from other institutes. There is an anonymous Twitter account under the name Civey Watch , which was the focus of an article in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit at the beginning of 2020 and was previously named "Unword of the Year" in December 2018 by the specialist journal planning & analysis published by the German specialist publisher . However, an article in the same magazine titled Researcher or Forger? the managing director of Civey competitor Forsa, Thorsten Thierhoff, quotes with the words: "Even if it would be better if Civey Watch were to act openly and not anonymously, the facts presented there are correct according to our observation and testify to great expertise."

Corresponding allegations (“What Civey does is charlatanism”) were also expressed by the research group Wahlen .

Prof. Dr. Annelies Blom, who is part of the external team of experts at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences , published a text in February 2020 in which she spoke of an "impression of deliberate deception by the data providers" that arises when companies like Civey do not respond to " pseudo-scientific palaver about representativeness and statistical errors ”.

In a decision that became known in June 2020, the Cologne Regional Court prohibited Civey from claiming that Civey “performed above average in election polls” (Ref .: 31O 88/20) and that self-promotion was “misleading”.

Counter-speech

Janina Mütze, CEO of Civey, countered the criticism in a press release: “The data from Civey are representative. Our online-based methods for data collection and analysis are based on standards that have long been recognized internationally. Leading international media rely on data that are collected using methods comparable to those of Civey. We rule out that our data is worse than that of traditional call center institutes. Rather, the opposite is to be assumed. ”The statement in turn caused criticism from the specialist audience. Sven Dierks from the University for Media, Communication and Economics replied: “Civey's statement is not a statement, but a sweeping blow below the belt against established institutes with a conspiracy-theoretical aftertaste. [...] I would be interested in a validation study in which Civey results are compared with data from conventional surveys. And if possible, that shouldn't be the "Sunday question", the results of which can easily be weighted on the basis of the survey results published by other institutes. "

Web links

Civey's website

Individual evidence

^ Short biography of Gerrit Richter

↑ Opinion research in real time - and with a fun factor . tagesspiegel.de, August 12, 2016.

↑ Brigitte Zypries member of the Civey Advisory Board , on marktforschung.de

↑ Council of Civey - own homepage Koschnicke the advisory board of Civey - on politics & Communication

↑ Sebastian Turner's website, accessed on November 6, 2019

^ Commercial register, District Court of Berlin (Charlottenburg), HRB 165277; Retrieved on November 6, 2019 from www.unternehmensregister.de (see notification of changes from August 19, 2019)

↑ Example of a SPON election trend , on spiegel.de

↑ Civey publishers on civey.com

↑ Berlin Monitor , on tagesspiegel.de

↑ If the general election were next Sunday ... , Wahlrecht.de Overview of the institutes, on wahlrecht.de

↑ ^a ^b The tricky business with online surveys , on uebermedien.de

↑ civey.com

↑ What is special about the Civey method? Civey website, accessed January 7, 2019.

↑ The oracle doesn't know , on faz.net

↑ Expert opinion on the representativeness of online surveys. Retrieved February 8, 2019 .

↑ "The debate has not harmed us" , on horizont.net

↑ If the sniper paints his target himself , on horizont.net

↑ Rainer Schnell: Why exclusively online population surveys are not representative , published on November 27, 2018, accessed on November 6, 2019