Our Greyhound Research Dashboard is now live!
January 9, 2023
At Data Sciences, our research projects are tailored to generate a clear picture of the social and political landscapes our clients face. Our Insights & Research team has a strong track record of providing valuable insights for our clients, from political to non-profit to corporate. We help clients put their fingers on the pulse of their audiences and help guide strategic decisions.
In addition to our client work, DS also conducts independent research to stay updated with the latest trends in Canada and to deploy and test new experimental methods. We call it the Greyhound project — a DS-led, always-running research polling project across Canada that allows us to regularly ask Canadians about a variety of current events, understudied issues, and other research curiosities.
Overall, the project has two main goals:
- Providing a space to regularly investigate new issues and areas of interest;
- Tracking the evolution of Canadian public opinion over time.
We favour an experimental and academic approach to market research, and Greyhound is our space to innovate, contribute to public opinion research in Canada, and share our findings with a wider public.
As part of the Greyhound project, the Insights & Research team, with support from the Platforms team, created the Greyhound Dashboard, a live dashboard that provides insights about attitudes and behavioural trends in Canada. The first version of the dashboard, launched recently, provides an interactive platform for users to explore recent data points for the first four chosen topics: the Covid-19 pandemic, Canadians’ priorities, attitudes towards climate change, and trust in science and experts. Over time, the dashboard will be expanded to include a growing range of topics.
The dashboard is now live on our website for everyone to explore for themselves and includes data collected as recently as November 2022. Our latest wave shows that optimism about the pandemic is on the rise and that Canadians are now mostly preoccupied by the rising cost of living.
Where are we in the night?
- For more than two years, we’ve been asking Canadians “where are we in the night?” as a way to measure the progression of the pandemic. As it stands now, the bulk of our respondents think we are approaching “daylight”, i.e. we are nearing the end of the pandemic, or at least a more manageable phase.
- This is a clear uptake in collective optimism about the end of the pandemic that takes us back to the pre-Omicron levels, between June and November 2021, when many Canadians felt like the end of the night was near.
- Starting in December 2021 and continuing into the first half of 2022, enthusiasm had dipped along with the rapid rise of cases in Canada, and many respondents felt like new variants were taking us back to midnight or the early night levels.
- Scrolling back in time on the dashboard reveals how these perceptions have changed over time across Canada, within Canadian regions, and across different gender, age, and partisan groups.
Canadians’ top priorities: it’s all about the cost of living
- Canadians’ top priorities have remained consistent over the last year. The cost of living, health & mental health, and the economy are the top three highest priority issues in Canadians’ minds. The high inflation of recent months has brought the focus on affordability even more than before: 62% of Canadians say that the “cost of living” is the highest priority issue right now, and it is cited as the top priority across all regions, demographics, and partisan groups.
- Despite this general consensus on main priorities, some issues are growing regionally: in Alberta, the importance of poverty, crime, and community safety have consistently increased since December 2021, while corruption and ethics have dropped in importance.
- Additionally, we find that younger Canadians have been consistently more likely to prioritise issues like equality, social justice and employment, while older Canadians, unsurprisingly, are much more likely to rank seniors issues as a top priority.
These are just a handful of insights that can be found in our Greyhound Dashboard. We encourage you to visit the dashboard yourself and discover insights of your own. Make sure to bookmark the page so you can keep up-to-date with Canadian opinions and perspectives.
We’d love to hear about what you find, and we welcome any comments, questions, and ideas for future topics to investigate.
- Our Greyhound project also offers space for potential and current clients who wish to conduct regular tracking in Canada and include a few questions in our regular surveys. Contact our Insights & Research team to inquire about research opportunities at [email protected].
About the authors
Our research team is composed of practiced researchers and project managers with expertise in quantitative and qualitative methods. We are a fully bilingual team based in Montreal, and have conducted research across Canada and all over the world, from South America to Southeast Asia. From online or phone interviews, focus groups, and in-person interviews, we know how to collect high-quality data and produce valuable results.