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The article discusses the paper on nonprobability sampling by authors David Dutwin and Trent Buskirk in the issue, commenting on the demographic bias, methodology and references surrounding the paper's research.Topics, including propensity score, the statistician Frederic (Fred) Mosteller's perspective on research bias and telephone survey response rates, are discussed.

The 2000 presidential election focused attention on the problem of unrecorded votes, in which a person casts a ballot but fails to record a valid vote for a particular contest. Although much recent research has evaluated voting technologies and their effects on unrecorded votes, there has been little research on the effects of ballot design. We argue that the same theories used to design arid evaluate self-administered surveys can be used to analyze ballot features. We collect and code paper-based ballots used in the 2002 general election from 250 counties in 5 states. We code the ballots in terms of several graphic design elements, including the content and location of ballot instructions and the layout of candidate names and office titles. Our analysis suggests that several ballot features are associated with unrecorded votes (both overvotes and undervotes) in the gubernatorial contests. We also find that ballot design features exacerbate the racial disparity in unrecorded votes. Ballot design can be an important factor in determining whether voters are able to cast a ballot accurately, which can influence the legitimacy of elections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discussion is offered on the article on causal inference and survey inference in nonprobability sampling by authors Mercer, Kreuter, Keeter and Stuart within the issue. Topics, including randomization, survey design, telephone surveys, survey response rates, variables, and total survey error (TSE), are discussed.

This study compares estimates of self-reported substance use and psychological well-being obtained in computer-assisted and paper-and-pencil self-administered surveys. We examine the extent to which mode effects on survey responses are moderated by respondent characteristics and respondent attitudes, including attitudes toward computers, attitudes about confidentiality and privacy, and their general mistrust of others. Respondents age 12-34 were selected through a multistage area probability sample of urban and suburban areas nationally and were randomly assigned to interview mode. There were few main effects of mode on self-reported substance use and well-being. Significant mode-by-age interaction terms revealed that adolescents were more sensitive to mode of administration than older respondents. Adolescents reported significantly higher levels of alcohol use, illicit drug use, and psychological distress in the computer mode than on paper self-administered questionnaires. Significant mode-by-mistrust interactions were also found. Respondents with higher levels of mistrust in others were less likely to report substance use in the computer mode than in the paper-and-pencil format. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on how do people respond when they are cut off from one of their regular sources of news. In this article it reports reactions of New Yorkers to the newspaper strike of December 1958. The sample used by Bernard Berelson of Columbia's Bureau of Applied Social Research was broadened to include all five boroughs of New York City plus Long Island and Connecticut suburbs. Interviewing areas were selected to reflect the ethnic and economic characteristics of the metropolitan area. Detailed interviews were accomplished with a total of 164 persons who affirmed that they ordinarily read a New York City daily newspaper regularly. Large-circulation New York newspapers have less "community" flavor than the dailies in most American cities. Local news in New York encompasses a vast scene, remote from most newspaper readers' personal experience. Except for newspapers, the tremendous communications apparatus of the metropolitan area continued to function during the strike. Thus it is remarkable that metropolitan New Yorkers missed the papers as much as they did.

When a voter comes to cast a ballot, some information about the candidates is evident on the ballot paper itself. Using multiple regression techniques, this study provides quantitative estimates of the impact of such information in recent British and Australian elections. The results suggest that whether the candidate's name comes first, middle, or last on the ballot paper has no effect on the vote in Britain. But it does matter in Australia, partly because voters are more likely to choose candidates whose names come first, but mostly because the major parities believe voters will do so and select candidates accordingly. In addition, women candidates are at an electoral disadvantage in Britain and at an even greater disadvantage in Australia. Most, but not all, of this disadvantage comes about because major parties are reluctant to nominate women candidates. Finally, in Britain candidates with an honorary title garner an appreciable deferential vote although candidates with an academic title do not. These effects range in size from a modest 2.5 percent of the vote to a substantial 12.5 percent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In POQ’s early years, survey data appeared only occasionally in articles and a focus on methodology was even less common. Today, by contrast, it is rare to find a POQ article that is not based on survey data, and many social scientists think of the journal as the leading forum for research on survey methodology. This sea change would have surprised the journal's founders and seems far from inevitable. An account of how and why the change occurred must answer at least two questions. First, what led a journal whose mandate was the study of public opinion in its widest sense to publish analyses based almost exclusively on sample surveys? Second, given the concentration on survey research, what led to an emphasis on methodology? This article focuses on the second question by examining the balance between substance and method over the journal's three-quarters of a century. It considers four kinds of evidence: the papers published in POQ; the POQ papers that have been the most influential; the POQ editors; and the authors who have appeared most often in POQ. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

This article evaluates relationship between the U.S. press and U.S. elections. U.S. people often find the way U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt won elections with a majority of the press against him as something unprecedented. The author brings out the detail analysis of press right from its initial days to the present scenario. He reports that in the early days there was federalist domination in newspaper activity. The reasons for federalist dominance in the press are clear. The early papers were published chiefly in the seaports and commercial towns, and they generally stood for and expressed those patriotic aims characteristic of the politics to promote commerce with Great Britain and to establish a sound U.S. financial system. There were six Presidential elections during the period of federalist domination of the press, and in half of them the winner was elected without the help of a newspaper majority. In the next four Presidential campaigns, parties tended to divide on sectional lines rather than upon the old and familiar questions of policy, while new issues made other new groupings.

The article presents several abstracts of research papers presented at the 27th annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research held in Atlantic City, New Jersey from May 18 to 21, 1972. The paper entitled Some Reasons Why Information Campaigns Can Succeed by Harold Mendelsohn of the University of Denver indicates that information campaigns can be effective: if they are planned around the assumption that most of the publics to which they are addressed will be only mildly interested or not interested at all in what is communicated; if middle-range goals which can be reasonably achieved as a consequence of exposure are set as specific objectives; if, after middle-range objectives are set, careful consideration is given to delineating specific targets in terms of their demographic and psychological attributes, their life-styles, value and belief systems, and mass media habits; if mass communications researchers work together with practitioners in developing information campaigns that are based on solid social science principles and designed specifically to overcome the types of indifference that are manifested by well-defined targets; if in their evaluation as much attention is paid to delineating specific aspects of the communications process which contribute to success, as has previously been allotted to demonstrating failure. The paper entitled Mass Communication and Political behavior: A Reassessment of Two Decades of Research by Sidney Kraus claims that mass media, particularly television, play decisive roles in voting and political socialization.

This section presents several abstracts of papers presented at the 25th conference of the Public Opinion Quarterly in 1970. The paper Sociology and the Survey Method by Robin M. Williams, Jr., highlights potential contributions of survey research to the development of sociological theories which include providing essential descriptive data and facilitating discovery. The paper Impact of Survey Research on Economic Theory by Albert G. Hart, states that the resulting stress on distinctions between permanent and transitory elements has strongly stimulated the growth of rigorously formulated dynamic models in macro-economics and econometrics. The paper Classic Models of Communications Effects and Innovations in These Models by Clark Leavitt, proposes a holistic model to replace the hierarchical model with its assumption of a discrete chain of cognitive processes. The holistic model proposes that behavioral effects can be explained sufficiently by three processes, arousal, information acquisition and planning. The theme of the paper The Wrong Enemy by Daniel Yankelovich is that the generation gap theory, is a misleading and dangerous half-truth. While a real generation gap exists on a few important values, such as premarital sexual relations and organized religion, research shows that most other core values are shared by young people and their parents.

This paper investigates the impact of paper and email contacts on web survey response rates. We use six combinations of paper and email prenotifications and reminders to test the impact of mixed-mode contacts. In addition, we use two survey samples that differ in their relationship with the sponsoring institution to test if the impact of contact mode is conditional on relationship between respondents and the survey researchers. Contrary to previous research, we find little differences in response rates across experimental groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rival partisans tend to perceive ostensibly balanced news coverage as biased against their respective sides; this is known as the "hostile media phenomenon" (HMP). Yet complaints of hostile bias are common in contexts besides the media (e.g. law enforcement and academia). Does a process similar to the HMP occur outside the context of news coverage? And do perceptions of political bias in different contexts share certain similarities? This paper proposes that the HMP is a specific case of a more general hostile mediator phenomenon , where rival partisans perceive various public institutions and organizations that are expected to be neutral as biased against their respective sides. The paper starts by presenting a theoretical framework according to which partisans' bias perceptions are affected by the threat to the power and status of their ingroup posed by a mediator's actions. Evidence from three studies (total N  =   4,164) shows that members of rival ideological camps in Israel perceived the Israeli attorney general and the Israeli police to be biased against their respective camps. An additional study (N  =   2,172) shows that both Democrats and Republicans perceived the social network Facebook to be biased against their side. Moreover, an embedded, pre-registered survey experiment buttresses the causal claim that ingroup-threatening information increases perceptions of hostile bias. The implications of these findings for our understanding of people's bias perceptions, as well as for citizens' trust in public institutions and democratic stability more generally, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do elections increase responsiveness of legislators to their constituents? Previous studies that examine the effect of electoral proximity have been unable to hold the roll-call agenda constant and control for differences in unobserved covariates between legislators. This paper utilizes a natural experiment in four state legislatures—Arkansas, Illinois, Florida, and Texas—where term length was randomly assigned. This design compares the responsiveness to constituency opinion of those randomly assigned to a two-year term to those assigned a four-year term on different issue areas, like the economy, environment, and crime. I find no evidence for an electoral proximity effect on responsiveness. In addition, in the Illinois State Senate, the causal effect of electoral proximity on responsiveness is measured on several individual roll-call votes, including the legalization of medical marijuana and gay marriage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

The article presents several abstracts of various studies related to black communities. The analysis is based on personal interviews dealing with the social problems perceived by black residents of Indianapolis, Indiana. In this survey, unexpected difficulties in retaining black interviewers necessitated using white interviewers to meet project deadlines. Anticipating that the data would reflect the operation of interviewer effect, subsequent analysis paid careful attention to the phenomenon. Ethical issues surrounding research with humans are of concern not only to researchers and professional associations but also to government agencies and the Congress. Another report describes the changing attitudes of executives toward the corporate advancement of women and nonwhites as well as their election to boards of directors, and examines the ways in which executives believe that women and minorities are now discriminated against in opportunities to grow into positions in top and middle management.

The article throws light on the psychology of attitudes and gives insight into one aspect of newspaper behavior. An analysis of the rumors regarding communist leader Joseph Stalin's real or pretended illness in thirty newspapers in Paris, France revealed that the papers tended to publish rumors that arced with their political attitudes. Anti-communist papers published rumors stressing Stalin's illness and a crisis in Russia; communist papers ignored the subject or carried rumors denying the illness and crisis. Studies such as this might be used as a test for listing and grouping papers according to their political attitudes. Studies have been made repeatedly showing that the news content of newspapers is influenced by their editorial political attitudes. Less attention has been paid to the question of susceptibility to editorial manipulation. The collection of all rumor echoes in daily newspapers was undertaken during a period of four months. All news items, which had a particular character of vagueness, lack of authority regarding their source or outright improbability, were included regardless of whether or not rumor as a source was specifically mentioned.

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.

This article presents abstracts of several studies related to sociology. Irving Crespi presented an analysis concerning the relations between anomie, alienation, and privatization. Joel Fuerst discussed the business of satisfying the unsatisfied demands of Europe. Daniel Lerner examined a shift from the earlier revolution of rising expectations, via a long sequence of unachieved ambitions and disappointed hopes, in the direction of what may be becoming a revolution of rising frustrations. Marjorie Fiske Lowenthal summarized several studies dealing with normal and abnormal adjustment in the aging process, based on panel studies of 1,200 mentally well and mentally impaired persons sixty years and older interviewed at three points in time. John T. Lanzetta reported data from a number of studies that explore direct and indirect procedures for measuring subjective uncertainty. Clark Leavitt presented the relation between a measure of information transmission called meaningfulness and day-after recall scores from field tests. Wallace H. Wallace presented methods to evaluate consumer behavior in the laboratory. Stanley Peterfreund examined a study in 1961 about the barriers to achieving a superior level of customer service.

According to a 1958 report by the Central Office of Information, the British public buys more newspapers per person than does the public of any other country in the world. In that year the 16 million families in Great Britain bought over 16 million national morning newspapers, about 2½ million London evening papers, about 27 million national Sunday papers, as well as huge quantities of weekly and monthly publications and over 9 million provincial morning and evening newspapers. There was then, and there is now, an enormous circulation of newspapers and magazines. Even so, the circulation figures for the national publications have, for several years, declined, as of September 1, 1961. By newspaper standards that decline is serious. It is serious because it means much more than a loss in revenue from sales or a declining service to readers. It means a loss in advertising revenue at a time when production costs are extremely high. It is understandable that the press should look for a cause. One of the things that pressmen and others have seen is that this period of decline coincided with a period in which the proportion of homes with television sets in them was still rapidly growing. This comparison constitutes part of the case for a fairly widespread view that television is responsible for declining circulation figures. This case has the support of an appealing argument that if people are spending their time watching television they will have less time for reading papers and that if papers go unread for a long period they will cease to be bought. This is, in fact, a large part of the case for suggesting that television is responsible.

Although a widely held viewpoint is that "the majority of the people get their news from television," a national survey shows equal proportions of the population reading newspapers and watching television news on a typical weekday. The study examines the public's attitudes toward the press in general and toward the specific papers, most often read. It also reports on the most commonly read elements of newspaper content and notes the changing character of local news. This philosophy affronts newspaper editors accustomed to a more searching and comprehensive style of news gathering. It also indicates the need to look at the present state of newspapers, their readership, and the public's perception of them. This was the purpose of the study whose highlights are summarized in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

When individuals picture the two parties, what do they think of? Given the dominant understanding of partisanship as a social identity, understanding the content of these mental images—individuals' stereotypes of the two parties—is essential, as stereotypes play an important role in how identity affects attitudes and behaviors, perceptions of others, and inter-group relations. The existing literature offers three answers to this question: one that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of their constituent social groups, a second that claims that people picture the two parties in terms of policy positions, and a third that claims that people view the two parties in terms of individual traits they associate with partisans. While not mutually exclusive, these theories have different implications for the effects of partisanship and the roots of partisan animosity. This paper adjudicates between these theories by employing a new method that measures stereotype content at the collective and individual level using a conjoint experiment. An important advantage of the conjoint measure is that it allows for the direct comparison of the importance of different attributes, and different kinds of attributes, to the stereotype. Using a pre-registered 2,909-person survey, I evaluate the relative importance of issues, groups, and traits to stereotypes of partisans. I find strong evidence that issue positions and ideological labels are the central elements of partisan stereotypes. I also find that individuals who hold issue- or ideology-based stereotypes are more affectively polarized than those whose stereotypes are rooted in groups or traits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don't Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these personality dimensions on the propensity to satisfice in both face-to-face and self-administration modes and in probability and nonprobability samples. People who score high on Conscientiousness and Agreeableness were less likely to be in the top decile of straightlining and midpoint distributions. The findings for Don't Know responding were weaker and only significant for Conscientiousness in the nonprobability sample. We also find large effects across all satisficing indicators for a direct measure of cognitive ability, where existing studies have mostly relied on proxy measures of ability such as educational attainment. Sensitivity analysis suggests the personality effects are likely to be causal in nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the effect of social media use on institutional trust in the European Union (EU) among European citizens. Fixed-effects regression models on data from the Eurobarometer survey conducted in 2019, the year of the most recent European Parliament (EP) elections, demonstrate that higher social media use is associated with lower trust in the EU. More importantly, social media usage habits exert particularly detrimental effects in regions with wider and faster internet connections. In such high-information environments, those who more frequently use online social networks, tend to trust those networks, and receive information on EU affairs from these networks have less faith in the EU compared to those in regions with lower-quality internet access. In contrast, in regions with lower broadband access, receiving EU information from social media fosters political trust. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Review of past E-mail surveys indicates that a methodology to achieve consistently high response rates similar to those that can be obtained by traditional mail has not been developed. In addition, researchers have tended to use E-mail surveys only for populations with universal E-mail access. This study utilizes knowledge from past mail-survey research to develop an E-mail procedure. Further, an experiment is conducted to assess the potential for using a multimode strategy to obtain responses from individuals unreachable through E-mail. The multimode approach proved to be successful and techniques shown to be effective in standard mail surveys were also found to be appropriate for an E-mail survey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Subjects in a shopping mall were approached with a request to participate in a survey. Half the subjects were touched and gazed at by interviewers and the other half were not. These nonverbal techniques increased compliance to participate in the interviewing task and somewhat decreased respondents' perceived burden. The touch and no-touch groups did not differ in response quality, apparent response bias, or volunteer bias. Compliance was related to the gender of the interviewer but not related to that of the respondent. Implications for mall intercept surveys are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2020 election and its aftermath present an opportunity to understand how audiences' changing news consumption patterns within an expanded, digitized, and polarized media environment shape electoral judgments. This paper introduces measures that capture individuals' partisan slant, partisan extremity, and overall diversity of news media use to understand how people interact with the contemporary news ecology. The measures combine self-reported media use with the partisan slant of news outlets along the ideological spectrum. Using these measures, we analyze a two-wave panel survey conducted before and after the 2020 US election to investigate how slant, diversity, and extremity are related to post-election beliefs, including public confidence in the election and the acceptance of fraud claims. Our findings show that Republicans have more insulated news use behaviors in terms of slant and diversity. The analysis also reveals that the slant of people's news use is associated with post-election fraud beliefs, with right-wing news consumers more likely to believe such claims. However, a diverse news consumption style can moderate misinformation beliefs. Panel analysis points to the role of extreme-right news use in decreasing confidence in the legitimacy of the election. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the dynamic relationship between electoral manipulation and popular trust in political institutions. Governments often manipulate election results by resorting to electoral fraud. They also tilt the electoral field by opportunistically deciding when to hold elections, in other words, election timing maneuvering. How do these two different types of electoral manipulation affect citizens' trust in the government, legislature, and election management bodies (EMBs)? We suggest that although the short-term effects of election timing manipulation are unclear due to its ambiguous nature as an electioneering strategy, substantial electoral margins created by timing maneuvering facilitate smooth decision-making, leading to boosting trust in the government and legislature over the long run. In contrast, as electoral fraud is an unambiguous form of manipulation, it may undermine trust in the government and parliament, although such effects may not last. By combining an original dataset of election timing with existing survey data comprising 335,000 citizens from fifty-eight democratic countries, we find evidence in support of our theoretical expectations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate how trust in traditional and social media correlate with misperceptions of electoral integrity. Relying on insights from political communication research on exposure to misinformation and selective exposure mechanisms, as well as insights on the different roles of traditional and social media in different regime types, we argue that misperceptions of election integrity are likely driven in large part by the interplay between the trust people have in different media sources and the context (i.e. the level of press freedom) in which the elections take place. Using data from a survey conducted in 25 countries across the world, we find that trust in information from traditional media decreases misperceptions, while trust in information from social media increases misperceptions. However, both these effects are smaller when press freedom is restricted. In countries with low levels of press freedom, trust in social media is even associated with lower levels of misperceptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well documented that survey overreporting of voter turnout due to social desirability bias threatens inference about political behavior. This paper reports four studies that contained question wording experiments to test questions designed to minimize that bias using a "pipeline" approach. The "pipeline" informs survey participants that researchers can perform vote validation to verify turnout self-reports. This approach reduced self-reported turnout by 5.7 points in the 2020 American National Election Study, which represents a majority of the estimated overreporting bias. It reduced reported turnout by 4 points in two nonprobability samples. No effect was found in a third nonprobability study with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Validated vote data also confirm that the pipeline approach reduced overreporting. We tested heterogeneous effects for sophistication and several other variables, but results were inconclusive. The pipeline approach reduces overreporting of voter turnout and produces more accurate estimates of voters' characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigate the comparative history of political ideologies by content analysis of twentieth century communications. It sketches some central aspects of the research problem confronted, some techniques worked out, and some results obtained. It also focuses, under what circumstances and to what extent are changes in the locus of political power accompanied by changes in the symbolic vocabulary of ruling groups. By applying statistical techniques to the flow of symbols recorded in the "prestige papers" of France, Germany, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States over the past half century, the authors found that conditions of war and totalitarianism tend to restrict the range of political symbolism, and that the time factor is less related to variety in symbols than is the influence of events. Three other researches with this purpose, but independently executed, have been completed or are nearing completion. Full reports on each of these studies will be published in the "Symbol Series" of the Hoover Institute in Alabama.

The article presents information on the psychology of newspapers along with an exhaustive study of the treatment, which Boston newspapers accorded to revision of the Neutrality Act that gripped the attention of the U.S. in the fall of 1939. This investigation is based upon a complete sample of weekday and Sunday editions of English-language newspapers published in Boston, Massachusetts. The extent to which this simplification of the story took place in the Boston papers was estimated as carefully as possible. The evidence indicates that editors and newswriters attempt to give as comprehensive and adequate a representation of events as they dare; while the readers insist upon selecting, sharpening, and pointing the issue still further to suit their desire for simplification and definiteness. Newspapers must dramatize and select in order to produce in their readers the emotional integration required for a good fight. A newspaper's pattern of influence is built around its editorial policy. Most papers do to a certain extent select news items favoring the editorial policy of the paper, and reject those that are opposed. In summary, the evidence reported in this study is interpreted as supporting five generalizations which are offered here as tentative laws in the new field of the psychology of newspapers: (1) issues are skeletonized; (2) any given newspaper's field of influence is well-patterned; (3) readers are more emotional than editors; (4)public interest as reflected in newspapers is variable in time; (5) public interest rapidly fatigues and presses for an early closure.

The outcome of the recent U.S. presidential election was widely construed as a repudiation of the American press, largely because of the frequently-published statement that Franklin Roosevelt won his stunning victory in the face of opposition from 80 per cent to 85 per cent of the nation's daily newspapers. Roosevelt's opposition Republican Alfred Landon was supported by 60% of the American press. No Southern daily of importance supported Landon so that the papers and the populace there were in substantial agreement. Except in New York City, where Roosevelt had a slight margin in newspaper backing, no large city outside the South had dailies predominantly supporting him. On the contrary, the preponderance was strongly in the other direction almost everywhere. It seems obvious, then, that Landon was, in general, the favorite of the press. Since he carried only two States, the implications as to newspaper influence can hardly be encouraging to journalistic practitioners.

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]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles within the issue on topics including relationship of evaluations by interviewers of respondents' performance to respondents' behaviors and response quality during interviews, use of web survey client-side paradata on browser window and tab switching, and misreporting in benefit programs and earnings.

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.