and measures your buying patterns, awareness of products and services or willingness to buy something. Political polls typically focus on public policy issues and views about elected officials. Political polls also try to measure how voters are reacting to candidates in political campaigns and what issues are important to them in elections. Collecting Survey Data How did you get my number? Most good telephone surveys of the general public use what is called a random digit dial (or "RDD") sampling technique to generate the sample of phone numbers used in the survey. The goal is to ensure that your telephone has the same chance of being dialed as any other telephone in the United States. When using this type of telephone sample, pollsters do not know the names of the people who are called. For more information on our method of selecting telephone numbers, see Random digit dialing -- our standard method How are people selected for your polls? Once numbers are selected through random digit dialing , the process of selecting respondents is different for landline and cell phone numbers. When interviewers reach someone on a landline phone, they randomly ask half the sample if they could speak with "the youngest male, 18 years of age or older, who is now at home" and the other half of the sample to speak with the youngest female, 18 years of age or older, who is now at home." If there is no eligible person of the requested gender at home,