Canadian Online Monthly Media Survey
An essential pillar of the CDMRN’s approach, our Canadian Online Monthly Media Survey (COMM survey) collects survey data from representative samples of the Canadian public on their political and media consumption, attitudes and behaviours.
What insights does our survey provide?
The COMM survey is a longitudinal study of Canadian attitudes and behaviours as they relate to the digital and political information ecosystem. This includes social media, websites covering Canadian politics, podcasts, and any other digitally-footprinted content. Data from our survey team is combined with insights from our digital-trace team to provide the most current, population-level information about the attitudes, behaviours, and responses from Canadian citizens to key information events.
Through the monthly survey, the research network tracks emerging trends and notable changes in how Canadians engage with and perceive information in the media ecosystem. Its quantitative, scientific approach is uniquely able to identify the potential contributors to changes or disruptions within the information environment. This provides crucial information for understanding how Canadians engage with news, their perceptions of current political events and their exposure to misinformation and foreign influence
Each month the survey’s findings are shared in the Situation Reports.
How do we do it?
The survey is developed by researchers in the Policy, Elections and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, and is fielded in collaboration with Leger Marketing. It asks a series of questions about news consumption behaviour, political attitudes, current events and misinformation.
It is administered each month in both official languages to a minimum of 1,500 Canadians. The sample is representative of the Canadian population based on the 2021 Census, in terms of (among other characteristics) gender, age, and location.
Paired with the data from the digital trace project and the Program on Information Ecosystem Resilience (PIER), this multi-pronged approach provides timely, responsive and methodologically rigorous data to help understand the Canadian media ecosystem and support its resilience.
What do we track?
News consumption: How Canadians get their news and how they engage with news media.
Trust: Whether and how much people trust news sources and other institutions.
Current affairs: Recent news stories people remember hearing about, and what they believe are the most important issues facing Canadians.
Misinformation & foreign influence: attitudes towards misinformation, as well as exposure and beliefs in specific pieces of misinformation; beliefs about foreign influence
How do we support information incidents?
The COMM survey is an integral piece to PIER’s efforts to help organizations better understand and tolerate information incidents. Every month insights from the survey are used to create our situation reports. Specifically, findings related to the following topics are shared: polarization, distrust, chilled speech, foreign influence, misinformation, concerns about AI, news consumption, and awareness of and belief in the month’s top true and fake news stories for the month.
Who is the team behind the surveys?
The COMM survey is conducted by an academic team of researchers at the Policy, Elections, and Representation Lab (PEARL) at the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, led by Professor Peter Loewen. This work is funded by Canadian Heritage through the Canadian Digital Media Research Network.