Nigeria Market Research Services

Political research is a core part of what we do, not a sideline to the commercial work. The same fieldwork operation runs both, which is why a political study gets the same documented sampling, the same quality controls and the same four collection channels as a brand tracker.

Voter sentiment and voting intention

Measuring where support actually sits, and more usefully where it is moving. A single reading tells you the level. A tracker repeated through a cycle tells you the direction, which is the part that changes decisions. We report voting intention, candidate and party favourability, issue salience, and the gap between stated intention and likelihood to actually turn out.

State and constituency level reads

National numbers are the least actionable thing in political research. Campaigns, parties and candidates are fought in a state, a senatorial district or a local government area, and a national average tells you almost nothing about any of them. We design samples to be readable at the level you are actually contesting, which is usually the single biggest driver of what a study costs and the thing worth settling first.

Turnout modelling

In Nigerian elections turnout frequently decides the result more than persuasion does. We model outcomes under different turnout scenarios rather than reporting a single headline, because a lead that survives low turnout is a different asset from one that depends on everybody showing up.

Political risk for investors and operators

For organisations with capital, staff or operations exposed to Nigerian political outcomes, we run research into the specific risks that affect a decision: how policy is landing in the states you operate in, how communities view a project or a sector, how security perception is shifting locally, and what public sentiment implies for the regulatory environment. This is primary research into the question you have, rather than commentary on the news.

The political office holder dataset

Alongside the fieldwork we maintain a structured record of 1,701 political office holders across all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, with party affiliation, covering governors and deputy governors, federal ministers, the Senate, the House of Representatives and every state House of Assembly. It gives the analysis a frame rather than leaving results as raw percentages, and it is published openly.

Political studies start from the same published floor as any other state-level work, with the final figure driven by sample size, the level you need results readable at, and whether in-person fieldwork is part of the design. Tell us the state and the question and we will come back with a methodology and a fixed price.

A focus group discussion is a guided conversation with a small group of people, usually six to ten, led by a moderator working from a discussion guide rather than a questionnaire. It is a qualitative method. It does not tell you how many Nigerians think something, it tells you why they think it, in their own words, and it surfaces the reasons a survey would never have thought to ask about.

The usual mistake is treating it as a cheap substitute for a survey. If you need a number you can defend, you need a survey. A focus group is the right instrument when you do not yet know what the right questions are, when you are testing how a product, a price or a message actually lands, or when a survey has produced a result nobody can explain.

How we run them

Groups are recruited to a screening specification you agree in advance, so the people in the room are the people whose view matters. We moderate in the language the group is most comfortable in, which in practice often means Pidgin, Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo rather than English, because a respondent reasoning in their second language gives you shorter and flatter answers. Sessions run sixty to ninety minutes, are recorded with consent, and are transcribed and translated.

Analysis is thematic. We code the transcripts, report the themes with the verbatim quotes that support them, and say how widely each theme appeared rather than implying a group of eight speaks for a nation. You receive the discussion guide, the screening criteria, the transcripts and the thematic report, so the conclusions can be checked against what people actually said.

Advantages and limits, honestly

The advantage is depth and the unexpected finding. Groups routinely produce the objection or the use case nobody on the client side had considered, and that is worth more than another percentage point of precision. The limits are equally real. Findings are not statistically representative, a dominant participant can pull a group with them, and people say things in front of others they would not say alone. Where that last risk is high, on income, health or voting, we recommend individual interviews instead.

The strongest designs usually run both. Groups first to work out what to ask, then a survey to size it.

Sample size is the question every brief gets wrong in one of two directions, and it is the single biggest driver of what a study costs.

For a national reading, around 1,000 completed interviews gives a margin of error near plus or minus 3 percentage points at 95 percent confidence. Roughly 1,500 takes you to about 2.5 points, and 2,400 to about 2 points. The returns flatten quickly, which is why doubling a sample rarely doubles the value. Population size barely matters once you are past a few thousand people, so a national Nigerian sample is not meaningfully larger than a national sample anywhere else.

What changes everything is the breakdowns you want to read. If you need a defensible figure for each of the six geopolitical zones, each zone needs its own usable sample, and the total climbs accordingly. The same applies to reading by state, by age band, or by any segment you intend to quote separately. Most briefs that look expensive are expensive because of the reporting cuts, not the headline number.

Tell us the breakdowns you need to act on and we will work the sample back from there, rather than quoting a round number and discovering later that the cut you cared about had eighty people in it.