Methodology

Who is surveyed

Two audiences, surveyed separately. Parents: a large national sample of US households with school-aged children, screened by an opening survey and routed into the parent question set; 96,829 parents have taken part across the three waves. Educators: a smaller dedicated panel of school and district staff who select and run photography programs, surveyed in 2022 and 2023. Educator cuts are read as directional.

How the survey is structured

Each wave runs as a set of online survey instruments: an opening survey that routes respondents, then themed sections covering ordering, spend and pricing, products and formats, communication, and yearbooks. The 2026 wave added something the industry has not had before: families who had not bought school photos in the past two years were routed onto their own question path rather than being filtered out, making non-buyers measurable for the first time.

How the numbers are produced

Every question across every wave maps to one entry in a canonical question dictionary (118 questions). Responses are normalised against that dictionary: option wording that drifted between waves is reconciled, multi-select and ranking formats are extracted with the method appropriate to each wave, and aggregates are recomputed from the raw exports on every run.

Where this report overlaps with the previously published 2022 report, the recomputed numbers reconcile with the published ones (headline figures match within rounding). Single-choice charts read as % of respondents; multi-select charts read as % of all selections and are labelled as such.

What is public and what is members-only

The public site carries the curated 2026 parent-buyer findings. The member edition carries the complete question set, the educator panel, the yearbook economics, the non-buyer path, and year-over-year comparisons across all waves. About membership →