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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]

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.

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]

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]

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.

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.

Most research examining partisan media effects uses individual differences in exposure to news sources to predict attitude change. In this paper, we improve upon this approach by using variations in cable news coverage to predict subsequent changes in viewer impressions of the candidates. This approach allows us to examine the distinct effects of in-party and out-party candidate coverage. Content analyses and survey data show that partisan media effects result from coverage of the opposition candidate, and not from coverage of the like-minded candidate. Specifically, during the 2008 presidential election, increased coverage of Obama (McCain) on Fox News (MSNBC) made viewers less favorable toward Obama (McCain). Meanwhile, coverage of McCain (Obama) on Fox News (MSNBC) had minimal effects on viewer impressions. These results suggest that media effects persist even during an era dominated by selective exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For decades, numerous surveys have asked Americans the “Most Important Problem” (MIP) question: “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?” Global warming and the environment have rarely been cited by more than a small number of respondents in these surveys in recent years, which might seem to suggest that these have not been the most important issues to Americans. This paper explores the possibility that an additional method of assessing the public's priorities might support a different conclusion. Three experiments embedded in national surveys (two done via the Internet, the other done by telephone) show that when asked the traditional MIP question, respondents rarely mentioned global warming or the environment, but when other respondents were asked to identify the most serious problem that will face the world in the future if nothing is done to stop it, global warming and the environment were the most frequently mentioned problems. Furthermore, a large majority of Americans indicated that they wanted the federal government to devote substantial effort to combating problems that the world will face in the future if nothing is done to stop them. Thus, future surveys might include both versions of the MIP question to more fully document Americans’ priorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the responses to various questions asked by different survey organizations. It considers the question of whether different survey organizations produce similar measurements of public opinion or whether house effects produce dissimilar measurements of the same population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on annual advisory meeting by the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). The meeting was held at the Hotel Sagamore, Bolton Landing, Lake George, New York City, New York on Saturday, June 1, 1974. Secretary-Treasurer Helen M. Crossley summarized her duties as coordinating and recording Council and Committee activities, communicating with the membership, supervising the Secretariat in collecting dues, maintaining records and running everyday operations, preparing the Membership Directory and, as time permits handling the financial affairs of the Association. Joseph Klapper, Chairman of the Site Selection and Local Arrangements Committee reported that attendance at the conference had once again broken records, with some 341 people registered at the conference desk and 460 staying at or near the hotel. During the past year AAPOR has been particularly concerned with the proper application of survey techniques, taken some steps toward resolving key issues and made some progress toward professionalization of survey work.

This paper will attempt to describe a system of question design, which has been evolved out of many years of research by the American Institute of Public Opinion. This new method answers many of the frequently voiced criticisms of public opinion measurement. It is a system of question design, which is applicable particularly to issues of the day. It is a design, which permits the survey organization to exclude from poll results the answers of any and all persons who are uninformed on any given issue. Since, the system provides an opportunity to probe five different aspects of opinion it has been called the "quintamensional" approach. The quintamensional design makes use of five categories of questions. Within each major category any number of questions can be asked, depending upon the issue and the circumstances. Therefore, while only five or six questions are required to cover all five categories, it will be much more useful to think of this system as a highly flexible one which can be expanded or contracted to meet the needs of a given situation.

Statistically designed sample surveys have enabled pollsters to gauge public opinion on a wide range of issues. In such survey's, selection of a data collection technique is generally based on four criteria: (1) cost; (2) completion time; (3) response rate; and (4) response bias. Typically, more weight is placed on the first three factors and, as a result, adequate attention has not been given to the latter consideration, The study described in this paper looks at one type of response bias--that which results from the use of a specific data collection method. More specifically, this research uses a controlled experimental design in order to determine whether responses given in a public opinion polling are influenced by the method used to collect the data. Three methods are investigated: (1) mall questionnaire; (2) telephone interview; and (3) personal interview. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author of this paper believes that public opinion research, especially the freedom to ask questions, may be seriously curtailed unless steps are taken to explain fully and widely the social value of such enquiries, especially in the commercial field. He advocates more public service surveys as a public relations tool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the author reports the results of a carefully planned and extensive public opinion survey designed to ascertain probable reactions of Turkish couples to a government program of family planning. Also, the survey undertook to weigh the possible usefulness of the mass media and the political and spiritual leaders in the villages in winning support for the program, particularly among the villagers. The value of a public opinion survey in implementing public policy in this situation is clearly underscored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interest in the political strategy implications of the 1960 election polls led authors to collect a sample of forecasts from around the U.S. The project started quite innocently as a result of a penchant for clipping articles from the newspaper "New York Times." Once launched on clipping poll results authors also wrote a few letters to newspapers and research organizations to obtain clarification of the news reports or additional information. But the reader should be warned that, despite these efforts, this brief review of last fall's polls is somewhat capricious and unsystematic, as of September 1, 1961. In all, some data were obtained on 36 separate measurements of electoral preference or voting intention. Of these all except one were styled polls, straw votes, or opinion surveys. Of the other 35 measurements about which minimal information is available, 14 were conducted by newspapers, 12 by commercial or academic survey agencies, and 9 for Democratic or Republican campaign groups. The percentage errors for the polls ranged from to 16.8, with the average error being 2.9.

Methodological advances of the past 20 years have been sparked by the development of opinion research centers, by the expansion of government-sponsored research during World War II, by the professional associations, and not least by the polling debacle of 1948. These advances have been reflected in a series of outstanding, and increasingly sophisticated, studies. Research methodology has been adapted to a wider field of subject matter, rapid strides have been made in attitude measurement techniques, and principal sampling problems have been partially solved. To see clearly the advances in survey and attitude research methods which have taken place during the past two decades, one should start a bit farther back. Much of the present stage of technological advance in opinion research is foreshadowed by Stuart A. Rice in the papers he published during the 1920s and assembled in 1928 in his "Quantitative Methods in Politics." They are also reflected by George Lundberg in his "Social Research," published in 1929.

We investigate whether survey answers of trained respondents differ systematically from answers of novice respondents. Focusing on difficult attitudinal or preference questions, we find that novice respondents answer "don't know" significantly more often. Importantly, however, there is no systematic evidence for a condition-ing effect on measured preferences (substantial answers). Overall, our results suggest that panel conditioning does not pose a serious problem, even in the case of rather difficult questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 2004 election campaign, millions of political enthusiasts downloaded poll data on the Internet, while "Weblogs" provided a new forum for commentary on survey methodology. At the same time, traditional public opinion surveys came under pressure from declining cooperation, contact, and coverage rates, and many automated and Internet surveys began to proliferate. This article provides some examples of "blog" commentary on automated and Internet polls and then explores the lessons to be learned from the spirit of innovation and openness of the Internet in evaluating new survey methods such as automated polls and those conducted over the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If voters are to hold governments to account for the state of the economy, they must know how it has changed. Indeed, this is a prerequisite for democratic accountability. Yet the perceptions that voters report often show signs of clear partisan bias. At present, we do not know if this bias is real or instead due to priming in political surveys. To test this, I assign subjects at random to either a political or nonpolitical survey. I then record their economic perceptions and compare the results for each group. I show that political surveys do worsen partisan bias, though only among supporters of the incumbent party. Still, much partisan bias remains unexplained, even in the nonpolitical condition. So, while economic perception items remain biased, we can at least be sure that most people respond to them in a similar way no matter the survey context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey of a group of individuals with generally high education level was conducted to make predictions about a large number of future events. It aimed to investigate certain aspects of the use of expert opinion in policy making. The other areas of concern were the validity of expert predictions in areas germane to policy, improvement of such predictions and the appraisal of the reliability of a given opinion, beforehand. According to authors, it was found that confidence in prediction does not necessarily show a correlation with success in prediction and predictions made by groups of people are more likely to be right than predictions made by the same individuals working alone. Besides, the reliability of predictions also, can be appraised to some extent by examining the character of justifications given for them. Further, as mentioned in the article, many policy decisions require foreknowledge of events which cannot be forecast either by strict causal chains or by stable statistical regularities. For prediction of such events, the policy maker has no recourse but reliance on the judgment of experts.

The article presents information about the organization of American national security opinions. This analysis is based on two major premises and their implications. The first is that the tie between public opinion anti public policy can be adequately understood only if one can reduce the "buzz and confusion" of responses to numerous specific questions to a limited number of hypothetical dispositions. These dispositions should account powerfully for variance in, first, a particular set of opinions pertinent to a policy domain, and second, opinions, collected on the basis of questions which differ slightly from the survey items which elicited the first set but relate to the same general domain. In sum, one looks for dispositions, which apply beyond the scope of particular survey items. The cross-tabulation of responses to several survey questions and the frequency of different answers to any one question provide quantitative measures of behavior in a particular situation, that is of responses to specific questions in an interview. Accordingly, one has 710 strong reasons to treat such data as if they were measuring properties of the respondents with relevance beyond the exact question asked.

This article introduces a pragmatic statistic for measuring the degree of attitudinal opposition, the degree to which an issue exists within a meaningfully defined population, a measure which may prove useful to other researchers in public opinion, intergroup relations and the evolution of norms and issues. The coefficient K was developed in the course of research on increasing attitudinal dissensus among the regions of the U.S., where a need was felt for an index of degree of opposition of opinion. That is, an index was needed not of the mere scatter of opinion but of the degree of actively opposed opinion in a given population, the extent to which an active issue existed. The data were in the usual poll and attitude survey form, a pro alternative, a con alternative and a neutral category comprised of don't know's, uncertain's, no opinion's and the like. It might be pointed out that K is a social statistic, it characterizes aggregates, not individuals. Unless the aggregate to which it is applied has some clear substantive meeting, nations, regions, ethnic minorities, like the other aggregate statistics, may lead the researcher astray. It is hoped that other researchers will find this coefficient of attitudinal opposition useful in their own work and it is planned to elaborate its uses in subsequent publications of own.

Surveys are a vital tool for understanding public opinion and knowledge, but they can also yield biased estimates of behavior. Here we explore a popular and important behavior that is frequently measured in public opinion surveys: news consumption. Previous studies have shown that television news consumption is consistently overreported in surveys relative to passively collected behavioral data. We validate these earlier findings, showing that they continue to hold despite large shifts in news consumption habits over time, while also adding some new nuance regarding question wording. We extend these findings to survey reports of online and social media news consumption, with respect to both levels and trends. Third, we demonstrate the usefulness of passively collected data for measuring a quantity such as "consuming news" for which different researchers might reasonably choose different definitions. Finally, recognizing that passively collected data suffers from its own limitations, we outline a framework for using a mix of passively collected behavioral and survey-generated attitudinal data to accurately estimate consumption of news and related effects on public opinion and knowledge, conditional on media consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People's activities and opinions recorded as digital traces online, especially on social media and other web-based platforms, offer increasingly informative pictures of the public. They promise to allow inferences about populations beyond the users of the platforms on which the traces are recorded, representing real potential for the social sciences and a complement to survey-based research. But the use of digital traces brings its own complexities and new error sources to the research enterprise. Recently, researchers have begun to discuss the errors that can occur when digital traces are used to learn about humans and social phenomena. This article synthesizes this discussion and proposes a systematic way to categorize potential errors, inspired by the Total Survey Error (TSE) framework developed for survey methodology. We introduce a conceptual framework to diagnose, understand, and document errors that may occur in studies based on such digital traces. While there are clear parallels to the well-known error sources in the TSE framework, the new "Total Error Framework for Digital Traces of Human Behavior on Online Platforms" (TED-On) identifies several types of error that are specific to the use of digital traces. By providing a standard vocabulary to describe these errors, the proposed framework is intended to advance communication and research about using digital traces in scientific social research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In research on sensitive questions in surveys, the item count technique (ICT) has gained increased attention in recent years as a means of counteracting the problem of misreporting, that is, the under- and over-reporting of socially undesirable and socially desirable behaviors or attitudes. The performance of ICT compared with conventional direct questioning (DQ) has been investigated in numerous experimental studies, yielding mixed evidence. This calls for a systematic review. For this purpose, the present article reports results from a comprehensive meta-analysis of experimental studies comparing ICT estimates of sensitive items to those obtained via DQ. In total, 89 research articles with 124 distinct samples and 303 effect estimates are analyzed. All studies rely on the "more (less) is better" assumption, meaning that higher (lower) estimates of negatively (positively) connoted traits or behaviors are considered more valid. The results show (1) a significantly positive pooled effect of ICT on the validity of survey responses compared with DQ; (2) a pronounced heterogeneity in study results, indicating uncertainty that ICT would work as intended in future studies; and (3) as meta-regression models indicate, the design and characteristics of studies, items, and ICT procedures affect the success of ICT. There is no evidence for an overestimation of the effect due to publication bias. Our conclusions are that ICT is generally a viable method for measuring sensitive topics in survey studies, but its reliability has to be improved to ensure a more stable performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although it is widely known that the self-reported turnout rates obtained from public opinion surveys tend to substantially overestimate actual turnout rates, scholars sharply disagree on what causes this bias. Some blame overreporting due to social desirability, whereas others attribute it to nonresponse bias and the accuracy of turnout validation. While we can validate self-reported turnout by directly linking surveys with administrative records, most existing studies rely on proprietary merging algorithms with little scientific transparency and report conflicting results. To shed light on this debate, we apply a probabilistic record linkage model, implemented via the open-source software package fastLink, to merge two major election studies—the American National Election Studies and the Cooperative Congressional Election Survey—with a national voter file of over 180 million records. For both studies, fastLink successfully produces validated turnout rates close to the actual turnout rates, leading to public-use validated turnout data for the two studies. Using these merged data sets, we find that the bias of self-reported turnout originates primarily from overreporting rather than nonresponse. Our findings suggest that those who are educated and interested in politics are more likely to overreport turnout. Finally, we show that fastLink performs as well as a proprietary algorithm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of increasing partisan polarization and media fragmentation, interest in the causes of conspiracy beliefs has been growing rapidly. However, there is little consensus on how to measure these beliefs. Researchers typically present respondents with a conspiratorial statement, then assess their endorsement of the statement using an agree-disagree scale, a true-false scale, or some other variant. Researchers sometimes include a no-opinion response option and sometimes do not. Yet, there is little evidence as to the best format. In this article, we argue that common measures not only are challenging for respondents to answer, but also inflate estimates of conspiracy belief among the mass public. We introduce an alternative measure that presents respondents with an explicit choice between a conspiratorial and a conventional explanation for an event. Across three studies, the explicit choice format reduces no-opinion responding and reduces estimates of conspiracy belief, particularly among those low in political knowledge or cognitive reflection. These results suggest that previous findings may be inflated due to measurement artifacts. This evidence suggests that researchers adopt the explicit choice format for measuring conspiracy beliefs and provide a no-opinion response option. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study documents the fragmentation of the American public's agenda. Updating work by McCombs and Zhu (1995), it measures the carrying capacity of the public agenda, the degree of diversity, and the rate of turnover in issues named by Gallup survey respondents asked Gallup's classic question, "What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?," from 1975 through 2014. Assuming the public agenda's capacity to be relatively fixed, scholars have argued that increasing agenda diversity must exert upward pressure on volatility, generating issue competition. This study reveals that the public agenda has continued to diversify, but volatility has changed little; indeed, the agenda was less volatile in 2014 than it had been in decades. Moreover, issue-carrying capacity has grown, raising questions about the traditionally posited limits of the public agenda's issue-carrying capacity. Issue-carrying capacity is positively related to agenda diversity and negatively related to volatility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies examined the role of language difficulty in public opinion questions. Guided by feelings-as-information theory (FIT; Schwarz 2011), the first study presents an experiment (N = 1,018) in which the language difficulty of public opinion questions was varied. Findings suggest that language difficulty affected metacognitive experiences, which in turn affected reports of political interest, political efficacy, don't know responding, and ideological constraint. Study 2 (N = 1,817) presents cross-sectional evidence from publicly available data that also indicates question-language difficulty influences don't know responding. Given these findings, study 3 (N = 8,090) presents a content analysis that reveals significant systematic variability in language difficulty within polling questions across 10 polling firms in 2016. Contextualizing these findings within a FIT framework, we contend that variability in language difficulty differentially and systematically affects participants' metacognitive experiences while responding to public opinion questions. Given that metacognitive experiences affect survey response, language difficulty ought to be more carefully considered when drafting opinion questions. To this end, the data presented in these studies can be used to aid question construction by providing numeric guidelines, using widely available measures that contextualize the relative difficulty of survey language. It is also recommended that items assessing metacognitive experiences be included in survey research to account for variance in this measure. At a time when polling data are ubiquitous yet polling accuracy is being called into question, it is critical to identify sources of unmeasured error within polling data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the proceedings of the sixty-second annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research which was held on May 17-20, 2007 in Anaheim, California. The conference held 84 sessions dealing with methodological and substantive issues in public opinion and survey research. The theme of the conference was "Of Polls and Policy."

Political pundits and scholars alike have recently noticed that public judgments of how well the US Supreme Court is doing its job have plummeted. Yet, the meaning of this drop for the larger legitimacy of the Court is not as clear as the poll data themselves. Some believe that dissatisfaction with the Court's rulings threatens the institution's legitimacy. Conventional legitimacy theory, on the other hand, posits a "reservoir of goodwill" through which the translation of dissatisfaction into lowered legitimacy is blocked. Positivity theory, with its focus on the legitimizing role of the symbols of judicial authority, provides at least a partial explanation of how legitimacy is maintained in the face of rising disappointment in the Court's rulings. Here, we focus specifically on the relationship between specific and diffuse support and the role judicial symbols play in undermining that connection, concluding that the Court's legitimacy is more secure than many imagine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen an increase in the amount of statistics describing different phenomena based on "Big Data." This term includes data characterized not only by their large volume, but also by their variety and velocity, the organic way in which they are created, and the new types of processes needed to analyze them and make inference from them. The change in the nature of the new types of data, their availability, and the way in which they are collected and disseminated is fundamental. This change constitutes a paradigm shift for survey research. There is great potential in Big Data, but there are some fundamental challenges that have to be resolved before its full potential can be realized. This report provides examples of different types of Big Data and their potential for survey research; it also describes the Big Data process, discusses its main challenges, and considers solutions and research needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on public attitudes toward political decision-making has typically focused on politics in general. This study attends to issue-level as well as individual-level factors that can explain political process preferences. First, drawing on the classic distinction between easy and hard political issues, this study differentiates between preferences for participatory versus representative processes as related to politics, abortion, immigration, and the economy. Second, this study considers citizens as pluralistic issue publics, testing whether personal investment in an issue is related to process preferences and whether issue importance or attitude extremity better structure issue publics in this context. Relying on representative survey data from Spain (N = 2,450), the results show first that process preferences are issue specific: respondents favor more citizen voice for abortion, a symbolic "easy" issue, and more representative processes for the "harder" economic policies. Second, attitude extremity more strongly influences preferences for direct citizen engagement than attitude importance. This study offers comparative evidence on citizens' preferences for political decision-making, and its theoretical, practical, and methodological implications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this Poll Trends study, 13 different sources are used to document public opinion toward homosexuality and gay rights in Great Britain in the postwar period. Three broad sets of indicators are examined: general attitudes toward homosexuality; acceptability of homosexuals in particular roles; and attitudes toward homosexual rights. Opinion was overwhelmingly negative in the 1940s and 1950s but started to liberalize following the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. Attitudes suffered a temporary setback with the advent of AIDS in the mid-1980s, but the thaw resumed from the early 1990s and accelerated following the millennium, especially during the second half of the first decade of the 2000s, culminating in the successful campaign for legalization of same-sex marriage in England and Wales. This trend toward liberalization has direct parallels in growing public support for several other facets of equality in Britain, notably gender, race, and religion. It also coincides with a significant reduction in religious allegiance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent studies of the U.S. Congress have demonstrated a substantial difference between the level of partisan polarization displayed by legislators’ votes and that shown in citizens’ survey responses about those votes. Perhaps public polarization would increase if citizens were more attentive to political debates in Congress. Using natural variation in citizens’ levels of political information, I show that citizens who are informed about the partisan alignment of issues have a preference distribution similar to that of Congress, even after the sample is reweighted to resemble the entire public in their political, social, and demographic characteristics via matching. In contrast, using a survey experiment, I show that cue and argument treatments only partially reduce the discrepancy between the views expressed by the public and the voting behavior of Congress on the same issues. Both experimental and observational studies have significant limitations for measuring counterfactuals involving public opinion, and so our understanding of the polarization gap remains unfortunately limited. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Much has been learned about why some citizens are tolerant and others are not. However, the subfield has not reached agreement as to how these attitudes ought to be measured, and at least three competing measurement approaches currently exist: (1) the fixed-group approach, championed by the General Social Survey; (2) the “least-liked” group approach, invented by Sullivan, Piereson, and Marcus (1982); and (3) an approach focusing not on groups but on support for restrictive public policies (e.g., Davis 2007). Although a few measurement studies have been published, generally research in this subfield has shown little concern about how different dependent variables overlap (or do not overlap). Measurement issues thus stand as an important impediment to advancing our understanding of the causes and consequences of political intolerance. This article considers the connections between political intolerance and general support for civil liberties. Most generally, I discover that different measures seem to be measuring somewhat different constructs, and that researchers therefore should not assume that different aspects of tolerance and support for civil liberties are interchangeable. These findings have important substantive implications for democratic theory: general support for civil liberties seems to be a policy preference legitimately contested within democratic politics, whereas political intolerance is a form of exceptionalism in which the political freedoms of particular groups and ideologies are targeted. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We begin with a look back at the field to identify themes of recent research that we expect to continue to occupy researchers in the future. As part of this overview, we characterize the themes and topics examined in research about measurement and survey questions published in Public Opinion Quarterly in the past decade. We then characterize the field more broadly by highlighting topics that we expect to continue or to grow in importance, including the relationship between survey questions and the total survey error perspective, cognitive versus interactional approaches, interviewing practices, mode and technology, visual aspects of question design, and culture. Considering avenues for future research, we advocate for a decision-oriented framework for thinking about survey questions and their characteristics. The approach we propose distinguishes among various aspects of question characteristics, including question topic, question type and response dimension, conceptualization and operationalization of the target object, question structure, question form, response categories, question implementation, and question wording. Thinking about question characteristics more systematically would allow study designs to take into account relationships among these characteristics and identify gaps in current knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article takes note of trends shaping public opinion research at the turn of the twenty-first century, as reflected in the pages of Public Opinion Quarterly. Three trends in particular are discussed: (a) refinement in understanding the nature of the survey response; (b) concerns over changes in communication technologies, and the challenges and opportunities they present to opinion research; and (c) worries about the quality of mass opinion, and especially the ways it might be shaped by subtly persuasive processes such as attitude priming. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theorists posit that a public—unlike a mass of individuals—forms opinions through awareness of multiple viewpoints and recognition of opposition in a polity. Whether individuals pursue information on others’ political preferences is another matter. While some are motivated to seek as much information as possible, others seek information that supports their own preference. This differential pattern of awareness has implications for individuals’ assessment of collective preferences. This article extends recent research on motivated reasoning to test whether accuracy goals (i.e., reaching correct conclusions) and directional goals (i.e., reaching preferred conclusions) affect perceptions of majority preferences. Results show that motivated reasoning affects overestimates of support, of both national-level opinion and modal opinion in discussion groups, even after controlling for partisan strength, demographics, news exposure, political knowledge, and interest. Implications for considered public opinion are discussed in the conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social scientists use two different methods for collecting information on the people with whom individuals discuss politics. Some surveys ask respondents to provide information about the people with whom they discuss "important matters," while other studies ask for information specifically on the individual's political discussants. Drawing on three of the most recently collected sources of data on this subject, we compare social network data that have been collected in these two different ways. The majority of our results show that the network data provided by survey respondents are very similar regardless of which network generator procedure is used. These results suggest that we do not consciously select specific individuals with whom to discuss politics. Instead, the individuals with whom we choose to discuss politics are the same people with whom we discuss other important matters in our lives. This finding has significant methodological and substantive implications for studies of social influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is strong evidence that the order in which response options are presented in surveys significantly affects the answers that respondents provide. According to the theory of survey satisficing, the severity of order effects should increase with task difficulty. However, the tasks provided to respondents in existing studies of response-order effects are generally very simple, making it difficult to evaluate the satisficing hypothesis. Further, evidence from cognitive psychology suggests a completely different mechanism: people are more motivated to persist in completing tasks when they are intricate, challenging, and enriching. I designed survey experiments administered over the Internet consisting of two types of tasks: (1) a complex task in which respondents were asked to rank seven public officials in order of how much they should be blamed for the property damage and loss of life caused by Hurricane Katrina in the city of New Orleans: and (2) a series of simple tasks in which respondents answered items with ordinal response choices on rating scales. I found almost no order effects in the complex task among all educational groups. Conversely, I found significant and substantial order effects in the simple tasks, particularly among low-education respondents. These results suggest that theories of survey satisficing may simplify matters by assuming that satisficing monotonically increases with task difficulty. Moreover, my findings have important implications for questionnaire design, underscoring the importance of randomizing response options. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Procedural justice researchers have long argued that giving people a voice in decision-making proceedings leads to heightened satisfaction with the outputs of those processes and enhanced compliance with decisions. More recently, this concept has been applied to the political arena with the suggestion that simply having a voice in the proceedings may not be enough. Similarly, the attitudes of external efficacy and political trust have long been linked. Integrating these two lines of research to incorporate important lessons about the dimensionality of external efficacy, I argue that giving people a voice in politics is not a universal remedy for ailing democracy. A voice that is perceived to have no influence can be more detrimental than not perceiving a voice at all. Moving out of the experimental setting by using survey data collected in a 2001 study of attitudes toward municipal government, I examine the impact that perceptions of voice and influence have on feelings of policy satisfaction and political trust. Findings suggest that perceptions of voice and influence do indeed have an impact on feelings of political trust and policy satisfaction. Neither political trust nor policy satisfaction responds positively to perceptions of increased voice alone. Believing that citizen voice, loud or quiet, has an influence is important. Feelings of policy satisfaction and political trust are increased only when respondents believe citizens had both increased voice and influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I suggest that the gender gap in party identification is dependent on question wording and asymmetric stereotypes about men's and women's partisan preferences. A survey experiment reanalyzes the gender gap by comparing the standard partisan battery to an alternative version that emphasizes feelings rather than thoughts. Bringing question wording into closer alignment with theory causes the gender gap to shrink. This happens in part because the "feel" questions find women to be less Democratic than did the "think" questions. Moreover, reduction of the gender gap occurs mostly among highly sophisticated women and not those usually susceptible to question wording effects. Contrary to popular wisdom, men and women appear to be more, not less, alike politically when feelings are primed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In series of articles, Mondak and colleagues argue that the conventional way of measuring political knowledge in surveys is flawed. Personality related "propensity to guess" underestimates the level of political knowledge in the population and distorts estimates of between group differences, when a DK alternative is offered. This has led Mondak to recommend the use of closed-ended items on which DKs are not explicitly offered, following best practice in the field of educational testing. In this article, we present the results of an experimental study which calls into question the wisdom of this approach. Our results show little evidence of partial knowledge concealed within DK responses; when people who initially select a DK alternative are subsequently asked to provide a "best guess," they fare statistically no better than chance. We conclude that opinion researchers should be cautious about adopting Mondak's recommendations for the design of political knowledge items in surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In random digit dial (RDD) telephone surveys, some proportion of the sampled telephone numbers cannot definitively be classified as eligible or ineligible. Each call attempt to these numbers generally results in either a busy signal or a ring with no answer. According to the profession's standard definitions, the proportion of these unresolved numbers that are, in fact, eligible is known as "e" and should be accounted for in response rate calculations. We used call records and a directory listed indicator from a survey with an extended calling period (and other features -- letters, incentives, etc.) to resolve as many unknown cases as possible and thus derive an empirical estimate (.47) for "e." We found additional support for this estimate by matching the unresolved telephone numbers from a separate survey to residency information from a commercial data vendor. The estimate of "e" applies to national RDD surveys featuring approximately a six-call design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the leading position of telephone surveys as the major mode of data collection has been challenged. Telephone surveys suffer from a growing nonresponse, partly due to the general nonresponse trend for all surveys and partly due to changes in society and technology influencing contactability and willingness to answer. One way to counteract the increasing nonresponse is the use of an advance letter. In mail and face-to-face surveys, advance letters have been proven effective. Based on the proven effectiveness in face-to-face and mail surveys, survey handbooks advise the use of advance letters in telephone surveys. This study reviews the evidence for this advice and presents a quantitative summary of empirical studies on the effectiveness of advance letters in raising the response rate for telephone surveys. The major conclusion is that advance letters are also an effective tool in telephone surveys, with an average increase in response rate (RRI) from 58 percent (no letter) to 66 percent (advance letter), and an average increase in cooperation rate (COOPI) from 64 percent (no letter) to 75 percent (advance letter). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During presidential elections, poll results frequently are presented in the news. Reporters use these polls to tell the public what it thinks about the presidential candidates. We argue that polling results tell the public what it should think about the presidential candidates as well. This study outlines how a character trait that is not usually used to assess presidential candidates was put into play during the 2004 presidential campaign. By repeatedly ascribing "stubbornness" to incumbent president George W. Bush, Democratic challenger John Kerry may have prompted this trait's inclusion in a Los Angeles Times summer 2004 survey. The poll's evidence that the public saw Bush as more stubborn than Kerry then produced an attribute agenda-setting effect that strengthened the link between that term and Bush. Using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey, we argue that the news coverage of this Los Angeles Times poll increased the salience of the trait "stubborn" in assessing President George W. Bush during June of the 2004 presidential campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on the annual membership meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). President of the association Betsy Martin called the meeting to order at 5:30 pm. There were approximately 117 attendees. Martin reported that during the past year there were several partnership initiatives put forth. AAPOR joined with the Council of American Survey Research Organization (CASRO), Council for Marketing and Opinion Research (CMOR), and Marketing Research Association (MRA) to file an Amid Curiae brief in the court case involving the Do Not Call list and to collaborate on an educational effort to ensure that congressional legislation does not affect the ability to conduct surveys. AAPOR's current membership is 1,662, a number that will increase shortly due to the individuals who become AAPOR members through their conference registration. In 2003-4, AAPOR had 182 new members. Currently there are 446 members from 2003 who have not renewed for 2004. This year AAPOR re-instituted the All-Chapter party and chapter ribbons were distributed.

This article presents information on the fifty-ninth annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Short courses include The Who, Why, and How of Survey Nonresponse, The Psychology of Survey Response: Lessons, Making Sense of Logistic Regression: An Introduction,Questions for Standardized Measurement, and A Researcher's Guide to Web Survey. Different sessions include Joint AAPOR/WAPOR Session--Cross-National Surveys, Joint AAPOR/WAPOR Session--International Surveys and Joint AAPOR/WAPOR Session--Polling in Iraq: Smuggled Samples, Drawn Knives and 95 Percent Cooperation. Different panels include Cellular Phones and Telephone Sampling, and Studying Racial Attitudes: What Survey Researchers.

We present the results of six experiments that demonstrate the impact of visual features of survey questions on the responses they elicit, the response process they initiate, or both. All six experiments were embedded in Web surveys. Experiments 1 and 2 investigate the effects of the placement of nonsubstantive response options (for example, "No opinion" and "Don't know" answer options) in relation to the substantive options. The results suggest that when these options are not differentiated visually (by a line or a space) from the substantive options, respondents may be misled about the midpoint of the scale; respondents seemed to use the visual rather than the conceptual midpoint of the scale as a reference point for responding. Experiment 3, which varied the spacing of the substantive options, showed a similar result. Responses were pushed in the direction of the visual midpoint when it fell to one side of the conceptual midpoint of the response scale. Experiment 4 examined the effects of varying whether the response options, which were arrayed vertically, followed a logical progression from top to bottom. Respondents answered more quickly when the options followed a logical order. Experiment 5 examined the effects of the placement of an unfamiliar item among a series of similar items. For example, one set of items asked respondents to say whether several makes and models of cars were expensive or not. The answers for the unfamiliar items depended on the items that were nearby on the list. Our last experiment varied whether a battery of related items was administered on a single screen, across two screens, or with each item on its own screen. The intercorrelations among the litems were highest when they were all on the same screen. Respondents seem to apply intepretive heuristics in assigning meaning to visual cues in questionnaires. They see the visual midpoint of a scale as representing the typical or middle response: they expect options to be arrayed in a progression beginning with the leftmost or topmost item; and they expect items that are physically close to be related to each other conceptually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]