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The article presents abstracts of various papers related to polls and the new politics. One of the paper discussed is "The Political Functions of Public Opinion Polls in the United States," by Irving Crespi. The dilemma of democratic societies that so concerned Tocqueville, how to free men from entrenched authority without subjecting them to a more arbitrary public opinion, is particularly relevant to the analysis of tile role of public opinion polls in the United States today. Another paper discussed is "The Changing Role of the American Political Parties," by Harry S. Aslimore. The upcoming election may be the one that will finally demonstrate the significance of the shifts in United States population, and most importantly the changes in communications that have affected the political process in this country. Some other papers discussed are "Polling: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy and the Bandwagon Effect," by John L. Perry, "New Techniques for Measuring, Analyzing and Reporting Social Change," by Samuell Lubell and "Application of Q to the Assessment of Public Opinion," by William Stephenson.

Presents abstracts of several papers and discussions related to public opinion. Political games and scenarios; Research on urban development and change; Public housing and social morality; Components of mutual international respect; Roles of the social scientist and the problem of creativity; Horizons of mass communication research; Others.

This article suggests ways in which the content analyst may reduce the size and drudgery of the news-hole task. The main problem involved in calculating the proportions is that of obtaining an appropriate denominator term without spending exceedingly large amounts of time and money in hand-measuring nonadvertising space, or "news hole." The numerator term usually is no great problem, in as much as the space occupied by the relevant categories ordinarily is obtained during the coding process. It was necessary to express the amount of relevant content as a proportion of total news hole. In the organization International Press Institute study, the relevant content was measured in column-inch units, so the news-hole denominator had to be obtained in the same terms. It was discovered that the coders were taking almost as much time per newspaper issue to hand-measure the news hole as they were taking to perform the complete locating and coding job for the foreign news items. Since the denominator data had very limited usefulness compared with the rest of the findings, something had to be done to simplify the news-hole procedure.

This section presents abstracts of several public opinion research published in the U.S. in the 1970s.

Public opinion research often identifies evangelical Christians based on a double-barreled, yes-or-no, question asking respondents whether they are an evangelical or born-again Christian. This paper uses a survey experiment to demonstrate the implications of this measurement strategy. Among White Americans, more than one-third of those whom researchers classify as evangelical using the standard double-barreled question actually eschew the evangelical label; the same is true for just under two-thirds of African Americans. Additionally, these born-again non -evangelical Christians hold less conservative political outlooks compared to the self-identified evangelicals with whom they are grouped, and, in fact, oftentimes more closely resemble those who reject both the evangelical and born-again labels. Despite this, the double-barreled identification question produces a White "evangelical or born-again" group that looks politically similar to a composite "evangelical" or "born-again" group based on two questions asking about each identity separately. Finally, important differences appear across race, suggesting that religious and political histories affect how people interpret and respond to double-barreled questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author extends his sincere gratitude to the readers of the "Public Opinion Quarterly," and looks back on his achievements as the editor of the publication. Aside from this, he discusses the plans of expanding the magazine which he says, led him to gather data on the processing of methodological and nonmethological papers. He also stresses on the impact of technology on the journal over the past few years, allowing them to incorporate online-only material on a routine basis and publish papers to be used as educational tool and resources.

This section of the Quarterly is reserved for brief reports of research in progress, discussions of unsolved problems, methodological studies, and public opinion data not extensively analyzed or interpreted. Succinct case histories are welcomed, as well as hypotheses and insights that may be useful to other students of public opinion. Usually, material in this section will be shorter, more informal, and more tentative than in the preceding pages of the Quarterly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fifty-sixth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) was held at the Hilton Montreal Bonaventure in Montreal, Quebec on May 17 to 20, 2001. The conference theme was Making Connections. Some eight hundred public opinion researchers accepted the invitation to meet colleagues and friends and to participate in the interdisciplinary program. The special character of the annual conference clearly distinguishes it from other professional meetings. Despite steady growth in attendance over recent years, it is a relatively small conference. Its limited duration, its submission review process and its carefully variegated slate of paper session topics constrain the number of opportunities for being on the program. With the traditional meals and social events, the AAPOR conference presents a higher quality, more intimate and more interdisciplinary experience than can be found at many academic, governmental, or commercial meetings. The structure of the meeting limits, among other things, opportunities to attract new AAPOR members, the willingness of exhibitors and publishers to display their wares, the range of topics covered in the program and the conference revenue that AAPOR could employ for worthwhile purposes.

When and how can researchers synthesize survey data with analyses of social media content to study public opinion, and when and how can social media data complement surveys to better inform researchers and policymakers? This paper explores how public opinions might differ between survey and social media platforms in terms of content and audience, focusing on the test case of opinions about autonomous vehicles. The paper first extends previous overviews comparing surveys and social media as measurement tools to include a broader range of survey types, including surveys that result from public deliberation, considering the dialogic characteristics of different social media, and the range of issue publics and marginalized voices that different surveys and social media forums can attract. It then compares findings and implications from analyses of public opinion about autonomous vehicles from traditional surveys, results of public deliberation, and analyses of Reddit posts, applying a newly developed computational text analysis tool. Findings demonstrate that social media analyses can both help researchers learn more about issues that are uncovered by surveys and also uncover opinions from subpopulations with specialized knowledge and unique orientations toward a subject. In light of these findings, we point to future directions on how researchers and policymakers can synthesize survey and social media data, and the corresponding data integration techniques, to study public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Opposition to LGBT rights remains a contemporary fixture within the United States in spite of increasingly liberalizing attitudes toward LGBT individuals. In this paper, I argue that a potentially overlooked factor driving this opposition is rural identity—or an individual's psychological attachment to a rural area. Using data from the 2020 ANES, I find that rural identity predicts less favorable estimations of LGBT individuals. Rural identifiers are also less likely to support pro-LGBT policy measures than nonrural identifiers. Nevertheless, I find the magnitude of the effects of rural identity on anti-LGBT views to be surprisingly small. It is also the case that, on average, rural identifiers exhibit net-positive estimations of LGBT individuals and are broadly supportive of LGBT rights, suggesting that elected officials enacting anti-LGBT legislation in rural areas of the United States are potentially out of step with the preferences of their electorate. These findings also have implications for what it means to hold a rural identity beyond a generalized animosity toward urban areas, and for understanding urban-rural divergences in US public opinion on issues such as LGBT rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trust in one's fellow citizens and in politicians are both conducive to well-functioning government. Beyond their separate importance, it is a long-standing notion that generalized social trust and political trust are connected in a mutually reinforcing relationship that further undergirds democratic governance. While it is well established that social trust and political trust are robustly positively associated at the individual level, there is much less compelling evidence regarding the causal nature of this relationship. Previous analyses have been unable to adequately rule out confounding and correct for reverse causality. This paper tackles these challenges through data and a research design close to ideally suited for addressing the causal status of the relationship. Using a 20-wave individual-level panel survey from Sweden analyzed using a dynamic panel model, we find evidence for a relatively strong positive causal effect of political trust on social trust, but little evidence for the reverse relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the proceedings of the fifty-ninth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). AAPOR focused on "The Image of Public Opinion Research" as a record-breaking 846 researchers gathered May 13-16, 2004 at its fifty-ninth annual conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resort in Phoenix, Arizona. The call for papers, posters, roundtables, and panel sessions, issued in October 2003, yielded 390 abstracts for papers and poster presentations, 21 panel proposals, and 9 roundtable proposals. At least three members of the conference committee reviewed each proposal. The results of that review allowed a higher rejection rate than last year and a subsequent return to the format of earlier years, paper sessions, panels, roundtables, and posters. A number of events helped people attend to the conference theme, beginning with an invited session Friday morning dealing with issues of primary polling in the 2004 election. There were two sessions Friday afternoon dealing with the conference theme, both focusing on how people perceive polls and public opinion researchers.

The article presents information about the fifty-third annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The conference took place on May at the Marriott Pavilion Downtown in Saint Louis, Missouri. Official registration was 566, including 77 new members. mere were 159 first timers of which 72 were students. A breakdown of the registration revealed 44 percent affiliated with academic institutions, 37 percent commercial, 10 percent government, 6 percent nonprofit, and 3 percent other. A total of 460 people were listed as participants in a variety of roles: session organizers, plenary speakers, short-course instructors, panelists, chairs, discussants, authors, and presenters of papers. In keeping with the tradition for conferences held during even-numbered years, the conference site was shared by the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), whose conference ran May 13-15. Joint AAPOR/WAPOR paper sessions included the themes of public opinion in developing countries, comparisons across cultures, and surveys and the courts.

While the migration of public opinion surveys to online platforms has often lowered costs and enhanced timeliness, it has also created new vulnerabilities. Respondents completing the same survey multiple times from different IP addresses, overseas workers posing as Americans, and algorithms designed to complete surveys are among the threats that have emerged in this new era. This paper is an attempt to measure the prevalence of such respondents and their impact on survey data quality, while demonstrating methodological approaches for doing so. Prior studies typically examine just one platform and rely on closed-ended questions and/or paradata (e.g. IP addresses) to identify untrustworthy interviews. This is problematic because such data are relatively easy for bad actors to fake. We carried out a large-scale study with an eye toward overcoming these limitations. This study examines the threat of insincere respondents using large samples from six online platforms: three opt-in survey panels, two address-recruited survey panels, and a crowdsourced sample. Rather than relying solely on closed-ended responses, we incorporated an analysis of 375,834 open-ended answers. By their very nature, open-ended questions offer a more sensitive indicator of whether a respondent is genuine or not. The study found that the incidence of insincere respondents varied significantly by the type of online sample. Critically, insincere respondents did not just answer at random, but rather they tended to select positive answer choices, introducing a small, systematic bias into estimates like presidential approval. Two common data-quality checks failed to detect most insincere respondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do citizens know about state legislative salaries and how does correct information change opinions of legislators and what citizens believe to be their proper levels of compensation? Through an original experiment with more than 2,000 registered voters from four heterogeneous states, this paper provides evidence that the degree of innumeracy regarding state legislative salaries exceeds innumeracy regarding many other political facts. Further, providing participants with correct information can influence policy opinions directly related to legislative salary but has no effects on indirect policy opinions, such as assessments of legislators themselves. These findings have important implications for scholars of public opinion, factual misperceptions, and state legislative representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports an evaluation of existing knowledge regarding the social bases of public concern with environmental quality. First, five popular hypotheses asserting relationships between environmental concern and eight demographic and social variables are reviewed, with particular attention paid to the theoretical explanations offered in support of each hypothesized relationship. Second, the results of 21 relevant studies are evaluated to determine the degree to which the empirical evidence supports the hypothesized relationships. Third, implications of the results of the review for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the papers presented at the conference on communication agencies at the University of Chicago on August 4, 1941. These papers may be grouped under four categories: first, effects of communications on public opinions; second, implications of communications research for social science; third, implications of communications research for public institutions and fourth, governmental control of public communications. Under the first category, the papers reported on effects of print, radio, film and forum. Under the second category, sociologists and professors examined the implications of communications research for the science and practice of politics. Under the third category, papers were presented concerning implication for public institutions. The fourth category consists of generalizations supported both by examples and by frequencies with which typical themes occur in the news content.

Here are three studies in opinion climatology which were presented at an American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) symposium during 1960 conference in Atlantic City. These papers are devoted to expositions of a technique for relating social structural variables to opinion, a technique which has attracted increased attention during the past few years. Opinion is surely not formed in a social vacuum, it cannot be understood without an understanding of its relations to its environment. Attempts to account for either the distribution of opinion on an issue or differences in the distribution observed among various subgroups of a sample of people have been a standard feature of public opinion research for several decades. On the simplest level, cross-tabulations by age, sex, socio-economic status, or place of residence constitute attempts of this kind. In short, quite apart from their substantive contributions, these three papers serve to illustrate some of the methodological procedures which are today on the frontier of opinion and attitude research.

Issues of sexual assault, sexual harassment, and gendered power imbalances have risen to prominence in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election and the rise of the #MeToo movement. This paper uses original panel and cross-sectional data to assess the degree to which levels of sexism have changed in response to current events, and finds very little change in levels of sexism from 2004 to 2018. The results also suggest that modern sexism significantly correlates with views undercutting the pervasiveness of sexual misconduct, purporting that #MeToo has gone too far, and opposing mandatory workplace harassment training, among other beliefs. Overall, the evidence suggests that modern sexism is firmly entrenched in the public mind and readily connected to public opinion in the wake of #MeToo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive complexity is a concept that allows scholars to distinguish unidimensional thinking from multidimensional thinking, which allows citizens to identify and integrate various perspectives of a topic. Especially in times of fake news, fact-free politics, and affective polarization, the news media would ideally foster such complex political understanding. The current paper introduces the method of cognitive mapping to measure cognitive complexity regarding citizens' understanding of the financial crisis, one of the most pressing political issues of the past decades. Linking content-analytic data to panel-survey data, we examine how exposure to news about the crisis relates to cognitive complexity. A wide variety of news sources (print, television, and online) were analyzed to take the high-choice media environment into account. Results show that news consumption generally is related to a less cognitively complex understanding of the financial crisis. However, actual exposure to news about the crisis (combined measurement of content analysis and survey data) is positively related to cognitive complexity, particularly among less-educated citizens. In addition, the most prominent topics in news coverage were more frequently associated with the financial crisis, as reflected in the cognitive maps of less-educated citizens exposed to more crisis news. These findings demonstrate the potential of news media to increase citizens' complexity of understanding, especially among the less educated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the increasing salience of issues related to free trade, research on citizen preferences over trade is sparse, and largely limited to economic explanations related to objective exposure. The present paper extends this literature by examining the psychological sources of the protectionist impulse. More specifically, I theoretically and empirically examine how citizens' chronic needs for security and certainty, key traits identified by recent work in the political realm, influence their preferences for protectionism. Examining data from three different national surveys in the U.S. context, I find strong support for the role of these dispositions. In addition to extending our understanding of the antecedents of trade preferences, the present paper has implications for the study of personality and politics, suggesting heterogeneity in the relationship of dispositions to ideology across issue domains. I also discuss the broader implications for American politics, arguing that these findings suggest latent tensions within contemporary party coalitions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How citizens hold government accountable in democratic systems is one of the fundamental questions of political science and has long been of interest to scholars of public opinion. Accountability for the performance of government requires individuals to make accurate evaluations of the effects of policy decisions, and to trace responsibility for policy decisions to the appropriate politician or political party. In this paper, we study the question of democratic accountability in the context of the health insurance marketplaces established by the Affordable Care Act. Not surprisingly, how citizens evaluate the state of the world and locate responsibility has less to do with marketplace performance, and much more to do with political allegiance. However, we theorize and find evidence that supports two substantial exceptions to the overwhelming role of partisan identification: Both political independents and those with personal policy experience are capable of linking objective conditions with broader political assessments. These findings have important implications for our understanding of democratic accountability and for the design of public policies in a federal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online surveys, particularly those that draw samples from online panels of experienced respondents, now comprise a large segment of the academic and commercial opinion research markets due to their low cost and flexibility. A growing literature examines the implications of online surveys for data quality, most commonly by comparing demographic and political characteristics of different samples. In this paper, we explore the possibility that personality may differentially influence the likelihood of participation in online and face-to-face surveys. We argue that individuals high in extraversion and openness to experience may be underrepresented, and those low in these traits overrepresented, in professionalized online panels given the solitary nature of repeated survey-taking. Since openness to experience in particular is associated with liberal policy positions, differences in this trait may bias estimates of public opinion derived from professionalized online panels. Using data from the 2012 and 2016 dual-mode American National Election Studies, we compare political preferences and personality traits across parallel face-to-face and online samples. Respondents in the online samples were, on average, less open to experience and more politically conservative on a variety of issues compared to their face-to-face counterparts. This was true especially in 2012, when online respondents were drawn from a large panel of experienced respondents. We also find openness to be negatively related to the number of surveys completed by these respondents. These results suggest that reliance on professionalized survey respondents, who comprise the vast majority of online survey samples, can bias estimates of many quantities of interest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper evaluates the influence of online news consumption on attitudes toward the European Union in a context of protracted economic crisis. Using data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, we combine location-specific information on broadband availability with respondent geo-location data, which facilitates causal inference about the effects of online news consumption via instrumental variable models. Results show that Irish citizens who source political information online are more prone to blame the EU for the poor state of the economy than those who do not. There is evidence of preference reinforcement among those with negative predispositions toward the EU, but not among pro-EU citizens. We complement this analysis with a study of voting behavior in the European Fiscal Compact Referendum, employing a similar methodological approach. The results from this second survey confirm the anti-EU influence of online news consumption among Irish citizens, although evidence suggests a pro-EU effect among voters who browsed the website of the politically neutral Irish Referendum Commission. Our paper contributes to the literature on public opinion, the EU, and political attitudes in times of crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on several discussions, which are related to American Association for Public Opinion Research. A large number of methodological and substantive papers were presented and have been collected in the proceedings of the Congress. In a review of these articles, two major methodological problems were identified in the field of secondary analysis. Most survey organizations report that response rates are lower now than they were twenty years ago. This is often attributed to increased respondent resistance to surveys. In line with this diagnosis, steps have been taken to sweeten the interview experience and prepare the way for the interviewer. Many questionnaires appear to respondents to be unnecessarily long, repetitious ambiguously phrased and difficult to comprehend; this causes high refusal rates, high cost, a non-representative dwindling universe, and doubts about the validity of responses. This round-table examined the influence of television in providing normative inhibitors and facilitators for what may be called prosocial and antisocial behaviors.

What theories explain variation in public opinion toward asylum seekers? We implement a survey experiment in which a representative sample of German residents evaluates vignettes of asylum seekers, which randomly vary attributes that speak to deservingness, economic and religious threat, and gender considerations of attitude formation. We find strong support for deservingness theories. Economic and religious threat theories also receive empirical support. Gender plays a negligible role. Importantly, we also document that economic and—to a lesser extent—religious threat considerations only matter when respondents evaluate economic refugees. By contrast, political refugees are welcomed nearly unconditionally. Our paper thus replicates key findings from Bansak, Hainmueller, and Hangartner (2016) and Czymara and Schmidt-Catran (2016) using a representative sample and points to an important interaction effect in public opinion formation toward asylum seekers: economic threat only gets activated when refugees' deservingness is in doubt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, the author presents his comments to the paper "On the Concept of Influence," by Talcott Pearson. The author confines his remarks to an expansion of what he takes to be the major thesis of this seminal paper. Communications in Western society is a transactional process, a major element in which is a widespread sense of trust. This notion, on the one hand, crystallizes a lot of what one has learned from communications research but have not fully articulated, and it adds, on the other hand, an ironic twist to the pervasive concern with "manipulation" and deception. For the author, the most novel insight offered by Parsons' paper is so simple that, once stated, it sounds trivial: Deception is based on trust. The Parsonian "channel variables" may seem like needless verbal distinctions. But if social scientists had firmly implanted in their skulls the distinction between affecting a man's intent and controlling his situation, much less nonsense would have been written about "brainwashing." The intention of this commentary is to reinforce the reader in the belief that it is worth the effort, and to encourage him to return to it for additional mulling.

This article presents the reply of the author to the comments made by professors Raymond A. Bauer and J.S. Coleman, on his article "On the Concept of Influence," published in March 1963 issue of the periodical "Public Opinion Quarterly." Professor Bauer has related the theoretical argument of the author's paper in an illuminating way to some of the problems, frames of reference, and data of opinion research with which both he and many of the readers of this issue of the Quarterly are certainly much more familiar than the author. He has thereby contributed importantly to making the main analysis the author has presented intelligible to many readers. Second, he has carefully elucidated one theoretical point that is especially important because of the emphasis Professor Coleman places on it. This is that the basic conceptual scheme with which the author has been working attempts consistently to think in terms of reciprocal interaction and not of a one-way schema of one actor "having an effect on" others. The author presents his views on three themes that Coleman refers to as blind alleys. The first of these is the assertion that money, power, and influence are essentially linguistic phenomena. The second is the classification of institutional components in an interaction system of the type dealt with. This again is an essential part of the frame of reference in which the analysis is placed. The third is the paradigm of ways of getting results.

This article is a content analysis of two newspapers that is designed to reveal the extent of bias in reporting the investigation of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) by the House Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight has presented an opportunity to test news bias in newspapers. The investigation facilitated testable hypotheses, even at its inception, since, with one notable exception which will be dealt with later in this study, the trend of the investigation was predictable from the moment the "leaks" occurred that were attributed to the then committee counsel, Bernard Schwartz. Content analysis was employed to discover "bias" in the news presentations of a Republican and an Independent-Democratic newspaper. The Republican newspaper was disposed to favor the FCC and the Independent-Democratic newspaper to be hostile to it. A substantial amount of relative bias was found in the news presentation, in relation to both "attention-space" categories and news content.

This article focuses on the impact of press on British diplomacy. Never does diplomats scoff too long at the latent mischievousness of the press, nor can they always be free from the atmosphere created by newspaper polemics; but their professionalism is something of a shield. British diplomatic mind when dealing with European politics, has no love for the press and very little respect. A distinction is made between the press and public opinion, and without denying the mischief of the former, does not identify it with the latter. The press may influence people, but it does not generally influence governments or officials. The press will usually follow the governments. Constant effort must be expended to ascertain which papers have an official "taint." So many apparent trivialities are reported that one feels diplomats watch the foreign press more than their domestic papers, which generally do not move them. But they must remember foreign diplomats may be angered by them. Cosmic forces, not the press, must be the main factor.`

This article reports on the proceedings of the forty-fifth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) and the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR), held in May 1989, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The four-day Conference consisted of 27 AAPOR paper panels, 5 WAPOR paper panels, 15 roundtables, two plenaries, and one didactic session. Together, these sessions included over 175 different presentations. The tally of all names listed in the program-including session chairpersons, discussants, roundtable panelists, paper givers and coauthors-indicates that 280 different persons contributed to the intellectual content of the conference program in some direct fashion. The two, evening plenary sessions focused on "Perestroika, Glasnost, and Public Opinion in the Soviet Union" and "Newspapers and Television as Election Pollsters: Do They Do Anything Right?" The didactic session was on "Designing Good Graphs." The AAPOR Award for exceptionally distinguished achievement was presented to Herbert E. Krugman.

This paper explores how well interviewers can judge which cases are likely to cooperate with a survey request and which are unlikely. Interviewers in a telephone survey rated the response likelihood of each case after every call they placed on a scale from zero to 100, where zero meant that the case would never cooperate and 100 meant that the case certainly would. Analyses of the ratings reveal that they do correlate with the cooperation rate among the cases, and that the likelihood ratings are influenced in the expected directions by case- and call-level attributes. However, there are also strong interviewer effects. The ratings show promise for use in responsive design procedures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Web surveys are becoming increasingly popular, as reflected in the growing research on web survey methodology (e.g., Couper 2000; Couper, Traugott, and Lamias 2001; Crawford, Couper, and Lamias 2001; Dillman and Bowker 2001; Dillman et al. 1998; Tourangeau, Couper, and Steiger 2001). Despite this spate of recent research, it is still not entirely clear if the techniques used to increase response rates in paper and telephone surveys will directly translate to web surveys. Yet understanding which techniques increase response rates in web surveys is increasingly important. Researchers are faced with decreasing response rates in surveys (Smith 1995; Steeh 1981), as well as increased competition with marketers and spammers on the Internet, for the cooperation of respondents (one recent study predicts that by 2006 e-mail users will receive over 1,400 spam messages per year [Tynan 2002]). Without such knowledge, web surveys may become less useful as a tool for survey research. Previous research on web surveys has focused on such areas as coverage and sampling error, effects of multiple follow-ups, controlling survey access, and survey appearance. Very little research has been conducted on how the process by which members of the sample are contacted affects the probability of response. In our review of the literature, we did not discover any studies examining aspects of the e-mail contact, with the exception of a study by Cook, Heath, and Thompson (2000). The meta-analysis of 68 web surveys by those researchers indicates that personalized contacts have a positive impact on response rates... [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides information on the 2002 annual membership meeting called to order by outgoing American Association for Public Opinion Research president Don Dillman at Saint Pete Beach, Florida in May. Secretary-treasurer Rob Santos reported that the financial status is good. The association has a surplus of $40,000. In the membership committee report, Dawn Nelson reported that the association have 1,378 members. A variety of outreach efforts were made, including sending e-mails and letters and making phone calls to lapsed members. Scott Keeter reported that the Standards Committee was enlarged to include members from each chapter and Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics and Consortium of Social Science Associations representatives. Diane O'Rourke, chair of the Endowment Committee, asked the members present to review the conference program booklet. They show the goals of the endowment, the status of the funds and the names of the members and organizations who have contributed since the inception of the fund in October 2000. Dick Kulta, reported that despite concerns about attendance after September 11, 2001, numbers were fine. He received 332 submissions resulting in 229 papers, 59 sessions, 10 roundtable discussions and 3 poster sessions.

European migration and border control has occupied a prominent spot on the European political agenda. The news media present the topic in a polarized fashion and reports conflicting viewpoints on how the European Union (EU) and national governments should address the issue. We argue that this conflict in news messages can have a polarizing effect on public perceptions regarding the EU's performance on this topic, and that this effect can be moderated by the valence of news messages. A two-wave online panel survey experiment was conducted on a representative sample of the Dutch population (n = 376). The results indicate that conflict reinforces and thus polarizes policy attitudes, whereas a message's valence can change people's attitudes, which reduces the attitudinal gap. The implications of these findings concerning European border control and migration are discussed in the final section of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2012 election, Americans were evenly divided over the question of whether Mormonism--the religion of one of the candidates--could legitimately be called a Christian religion. This has potentially serious consequences in an electorate with a large Christian majority, and in a country where religious and national identities are closely associated. This paper uses a framework from social identity theory and data from the 2012 ANES Time Series to explain this divide in opinion, which went far beyond traditional evangelical hostility to Mormons and crossed party lines. Because of their theological heterodoxy and cultural difference, Mormons are less likely to be regarded as Christians by other Christians who identify very strongly with their faith. Prototype theory suggests these strong identifiers are more concerned with maintaining strict requirements for group membership, while weaker identifiers are more likely to accept Mormons as Christians. In the context of an election campaign with a Mormon candidate, however, party identity also matters. Christians who identify strongly with the Republican Party are, all things being equal, more likely than weaker party identifiers or Democrats to regard Mormons as Christians, because they want "their" candidate to be part of the religious in-group. All else being equal, voters who did not regard Mormons as Christians were 18 percent less likely to vote for Romney. However, the electoral damage to Romney was mitigated by Republican Party identification, which led many Christian voters to identify Mormons as Christians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article informs about the 1991 Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) which was held in Phoenix, Arizona on May 16-19, at the Pointe at Squaw Peak. The 3-day conference consisted of 3 plenary sessions, 1 didactic seminar, 31 regular paper sessions, 10 roundtables, and 4 scheduled meetings. The tally of all names listed in the program-including session chairpersons, discussants, roundtable panelists, paper givers and coauthors, committee members, AAPOR secretariat, and student helpers, indicates that approximately three hundred fifty different people contributed to the intellectual content and smooth conduct of the conference program. The AAPOR Award for exceptionally distinguished achievement was presented to Joe Belden. The AAPOR Student Paper Award went to Martin Gilens of the University of California, Berkeley. In addition, Diana Druker and Toby Goldberg, of Rosenberg and Druker, were honored with special plaques for their long years of service as the AAPOR secretariat.

This is a report on how often the British express opinions in terms of the United Nations. It is drawn from a content analysis of the whole of Britain's daily national press during the period from the end of 1945 to the beginning of 1950. The method used was a form of content analysis, theme analysis. Press opinions about the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics amounted to more than 40,000 spread across the four years, that elaborate pretest of the data made possible a "code" of 72 themes, the only politically meaningful assertions made about the two countries by British newspapers or by Britons in their newspapers in any recurrence whatever. In 1954, when, in preparation for the world organization's tenth anniversary and possible revision of the Charter, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is attempting to report on what the peoples of more than 20 countries say and feel about the United Nations, it may be useful to record the inescapable conclusion that to one of the world's most literate peoples, the British, United Nations almost never did and most probably almost never does matter.

This year's conference, May 19-22, was the second held at "The Inn" at Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, and the first under the new management of the inn. Attendance was large and, as usual for American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) conferences, the attendees were argumentative. It was a good and useful conference highlighted by three major sessions, the Paul Lazarsfeld Memorial Lecture given by Peter Rossi, the plenary session on the 1976 election, and the return of "The Author Meets the Critics" in honor of Shirley Star. The conference chair, Howard Freeman, and his able committee put together an outstanding program. An innovation this year was the introduction of two sessions of contributed papers. The growth in the number of papers that did not fit any particular session but were of high quality led to this departure. The large number of such papers is a healthy sign for the field as a whole. A strong effort to circulate campuses by Nelson Foote and his committee also led to a set of high quality submissions for the student award. As usual, Joe Klapper did yeoman work in planning and arranging the physical facilities.

Findings from analyses presented in this paper, using data from a Roper survey, suggest that the role of attitudes toward homosexuals should be at the center of future explorations of the relationship between the media coverage of AIDS and public opinion. While the available data are limited, our analyses raise the possibility that anti-gay attitudes constrain the ability of the media to effectively communicate information about risk factors and how the disease is transmitted. Researchers need to explore the possibility that anti-gay attitudes stand between media information and public knowledge and public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is the best hour, day of the week, or month to conduct telephone interviews? Data in this paper suggest that weekday evening hours during the spring and fall are optimal times for contacting households for personal interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A president skillful enough, or fortunate enough, to preside over a healthy economy is rewarded with public support. This paper examines two conceptions of the individual citizen that might underlie this relationship. A president's popularity might decline when economic times are bad because citizens in effect blame him for their personal hardships-the pocketbook citizen hypothesis-or because they see the president as failing to cope adequately with national economic problems, quite apart from the economic dislocations of private life-the sociotropic citizen hypothesis. Across a variety of tests, results from national surveys covering the Nixon, Ford, and Carter presidencies consistently supported the sociotropic hypothesis. The paper concludes by suggesting several promising explanations for the findings, and by exploring their normative implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the Harris Survey after the U.S. Department of Defense's flurry in the summer of 1971 which revealed behind-scenes decisions in the making of the Vietnam war. For example, 70 percent agreed that if there was any doubt about violating the national security in publishing documents such as the Defense department's papers on the Far East, then the documents should not be published. But obviously the revelations were not widely judged dangerous, for 58 percent simultaneously agreed that in a democracy such as ours, it is necessary to tell people the truth about how we got into the war in Vietnam, even if it means top secret documents, as long as they are not about today's situation there. And although the public has never exhibited overweaning concern for freedom of the press, Harris further reported that 45 per cent were of the opinion that if a newspaper had to get permission from the government to print inside information, then the public would not be told the truth. This collection of questions reveals some facts about presidential administrations and the historical periods they encompassed. Before Vietnam none of the phraseology was in personal terms. Wording referred to the government, officials or just news about the war or foreign relations.

The article presents the proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Conference of American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) that was held on May 18-21, 1967 at Bolton Landing, New York. The conference was divided into fifteen formal sessions and three round tables. The new format also consists a presentation program of the best papers from a recent AAPOR competition for graduate students. In addition to the informative meetings, numerous social events were also organized. Also, the AAPOR Award of 1967 for distinguished achievement in the field of public opinion was presented to Hans Zeisel, a social researcher. Some of the topics on which papers were presented at the conference are: variations in the application of theory to attitude and opinion research; interviewing: special situations and problems; polling and the political process; socio-medical research in sensitive areas; predicting purchasing behavior: alchemy or science? and; computer-assisted analysis of survey data.

In an earlier paper in this journal,* the author suggested that the processes of attitude change underlying mass communication impact are of two kinds: with low involvement to persuasive stimuli one might look for gradual shifts in perceptual structure, aided by repetition, activated by behavioral choice situations, and followed at some time by attitude change, while with high involvement one could look instead [or the classic and familiar conflict of ideas at the level of conscious opinion and attitude that precedes changes in behavior. The present paper describes the development and application of a workable tool to measure this involvement, a necessary step in the study of communication impact along these lines is to proceed further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many studies of alienation have related it to social characteristics such as occupation, education, race, and urbanization. This paper considers also its relation to political attitudes toward such issues as governmental action programs, racial integration, freedom of speech, and international organizations, and finds that it has important effects in all these areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents three "climate of opinion" studies that illustrate some of the possibilities, as well as some of the problems, that arise when survey analysts turn to the study of effects of social contexts. Description of the studies; Importance of surveys to sociologists; Valuable information that may be obtained from surveys when the right questions are asked; Comparison of the studies.

This paper is the Presidential Address which was delivered before the Thirteenth Annual Conference on Public Opinion Research in Chicago, Illinois, on May 10, 1958. The original, written and spoken with frequent resort to the first person pleural, loses something of its earnest tone when translated into a more conventional style for publication but it still calls for constructive criticism of current opinion research and effect the preparation to meet the increasingly exacting standards of the future. Frederick F. Stephan was President of the American Association for Public Opinion Research for the 1957-1959 term. He is Professor of Social Statistics at Princeton University. The central principle of the Conference is to take a broad look at what is being done in opinion research and to think more deeply about its meaning for clients, the public at large, and researchers themselves. In furtherance of this purpose the author chose as the title of the address on which this paper is based, a simple but serious question.

The article presents a pre-election survey in a semi-literate society. Public opinion survey techniques have become very useful instruments for the administrator of the now rapidly developing under-developed areas. In this article, the authors describe some of the special problems involved in a pre-election survey done in Africa. They conclude that, though the difficulties are different from those facing researchers in Western society, the techniques developed in literate countries can be applied in radically different environments. Public opinion surveys among the indigenous populations of African territories present problems, which are intriguing but as yet very little explored. Self-governing institutions are being established in some of these territories more rapidly than are educational institutions and the ballot-paper is already in the grasp of many a hand that has never held a pen. This inquiry was on too small a scale to bear the weight of much generalization but it does suggest that the difficulties of making public opinion surveys among predominantly illiterate African populations are not insuperable.

The article presents a prerequisite for participation in the public opinion process. While there is a respectable body of literature on public opinion, the best portion of it takes the character of opinion itself for granted and is concerned with the problem of the public and public opinion as such. The concept of opinion is not so obvious that it can be taken for granted. This paper examines the concept of opinion and turn what may be learned thereby into its implications for knowledge of the public opinion process. Opinions have been intimately associated with attitudes by social psychologists. It is wise to avoid equating them, however, if only because the concept of attitude is one of the most nebulous in social psychology, about which there is little real consensus. It has been argued in this paper that the character of opinion has implications for understanding of the public opinion process. It was noted that opinion implies a certain relative point of view, and that the process of the formation of public opinion is distinguished from other kinds of collective problem-solving by its participants' relative point of view.