Join us at May 28th, at 11:00 UTC for our webinar “Anonymity Sampling: An Innovative Method for Measuring Hidden Opinions in Authoritarian Contexts“.
In open societies, public opinion is typically measured through telephone interviews, face-to-face surveys, or verified online panels—methods that, despite their limitations, are generally considered reliable for producing valid results. Respondents in authoritarian contexts, however, will be affected by fear of the state and often conceal or falsify their true views. This makes it extremely difficult for researchers to capture valid public sentiment.
For social scientists and survey researchers, the key challenge is this: how can we measure suppressed or hidden opinions in a way that is representative, while ensuring that respondents feel safe enough to answer honestly?
We recognize that in a country like Iran, promises of confidentiality are not sufficient to reassure respondents and cannot be conflated with anonymity.
To address this, the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran (GAMAAN) has developed an approach called Anonymity Sampling, which relies on anonymous, self-administered, large-scale, and carefully designed online surveys to ensure respondent safety and data integrity.
In the first part of this webinar, Dr. Ammar Maleki presents GAMAAN’s anonymity sampling method. By comparing results with those of conventional surveys, he demonstrates how, especially in the context of Iran, traditional survey techniques can yield misleading results when applied to sensitive topics.
In the second part, Dr. Pooyan Tamimi Arab focuses on the case of religiosity in Iran, highlighting how GAMAAN’s data has revealed a significant secular shift—one that has long remained hidden from studies relying on conventional methods.
Ammar Maleki is an Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is also the founder and director of GAMAAN (the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran), an independent, non-profit research foundation that conducts public opinion research on sensitive topics within Iranian society. GAMAAN pioneers innovative online methodologies to ensure anonymity and accuracy in measuring public attitudes in authoritarian contexts and was awarded the 2022 President’s Medal by the Market Research Society (MRS) for its “extraordinary contribution to research”. Dr. Maleki has also been selected as the WAPOR Country Representative for Iran for the 2025–2026 term.
Pooyan Tamimi Arab is an Assistant Professor at Utrecht University’s Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies and a board member of GAMAAN. He combines disciplines such as religious studies, art history, anthropology, and sociology with political philosophy, in order to better understand secular-religious dynamics. He is the PI of the mixed methods project “Iran’s Secular Shift”, which is funded by the Dutch Research Council and runs between 2025-2030. Dr. Tamimi Arab is a member of the Young Academy of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
