A Prophet doesn't poll to see wind of public opinion
According to Glenn L. Pace, Second Counselor in the Presiding Bishopric in the April 1989 General Conference:
A prophet doesn’t take a poll to see which way the wind of public opinion is blowing.
Here are the surveys the Church was performing previous to and those it has conducted following that statement:
note: I am merging lists, so it’s possible one or two of these is a duplicate of another (listed via a different source).
- 1963 “We are in the midst of a survey looking toward the possibility of admitting Negroes” here
- 1988 Temple Survey (Research and Evaluation Division) here or here
- 1991 Single Adults survey here
- 1999 Survey on less-actives (referenced in GC here)
- 2005–2013 Member Trends survey, see footnote #4 here
- Confidential LDS Church Survey, mostly regarding the LDS essays, March 14, 2014 here
- Survey on women, ordination, apostasy, and PR, 2014 here
- Survey on temple garments, officially linking to lds.org, and performed by Qualtrics. here, here, and here
- Focus groups to better understand how millenials think about controversial topics here
- Survey on controversial topics here
- Poll from the Presidency of the Seventy to monitor the impact of the focus on Sabbath day observance here
- A survey inquiring about members’ experiences visiting the Washington DC Temple Visitors’ Center. here
- A survey regarding the perceived influence of the LDS Church in Utah politics. here
- A survey on perceptions and attitudes regarding religion and spirituality. here and here, with questions.
- Member panel survey, September 2014 here
- Survey on technology usage 2015 here
- Survey on believs in Mormon Doctrine, and go see Meet the Mormons here
- Summary of survey on youth engagement with media from Jan 2016 here
- 2015 Youth Survey on media (seems similar to but somewhat distinct from the Jan 2016 summary?) here
- Survey on same sex issues, 2014 here
- Survey on the Sabbath, Aug 2015 here
- Church Service Mission Slogan Survey, Oct 2015 here
- Survey on single members’ concerns
- Mission age change focus group (anecdotal) here
- Survey on the new Gospel Topics essays, September 2014, here
- Survey on gays in the Church, Nov 2017, here
- Correlation Research Division Youth Survey on youth committment to and engagement in the church, 56 pages, 2018, here
- Survey on difficult topics, 2021, here
note: very small list originally shared here
acknowledgements: About 10 of these were taken from a list made by /u/japanesepiano, and other bullets were supplemented with some of their info. 1963 survey h/t No_Engineering; questions on perceptions and attitudes regarding religion and spirituality h/t Stuart98; 2018 Correlation survey h/t formermormer.