Mass Political Attitudes and the Survey Response

1975 ◽  
Vol 69 (4) ◽  
pp. 1218-1231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher H. Achen
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Measurement Error ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Survey Response ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Survey Questions

Students of public opinion research have argued that voters show very little consistency and structure in their political attitudes. A model of the survey response is proposed which takes account of the vagueness in opinion survey questions and in response categories. When estimates are made of this vagueness or “measurement error” and the estimates applied to the principal previous study, nearly all the inconsistency is shown to be the result of the vagueness of the questions rather than of any failure by the respondents.

scholarly journals The raced constitution of Europe: The Eurobarometer and the statistical imagination of European racism

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 144-163 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Slootweg ◽  
Rogier van Reekum ◽  
Willem Schinkel
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Public Opinion Survey ◽  
Opinion Polling ◽  
The Past ◽  
European Public ◽  
Shed Light

Centering upon the first Europe-wide public opinion survey of racism, carried out by the Eurobarometer in 1988, this article explores how studying European public opinion research can shed light on what we call the raced constitution of Europe. Based on an analysis of this Eurobarometer survey, we scrutinize how Eurobarometer opinion polling involves a constant scale-switching through which ‘Europe’ and ‘racism’ are co-produced. As we argue, techniques of European opinion polling contributed to the imagination of a ‘European’ ideological whole, from which stabilized categories of ‘non-European others’ were excluded. By creating an opposition between ‘democratic Europe’ and ‘individualized xenophobia’, racism was enacted as a lower class attitude ‘not of Europe’ and as a permanent rem(a)inder of the past that serves to legitimate the project of European integration.

scholarly journals Understandings of the Nation in Russian Public Opinion: Survey Evidence from Putin’s Russia (2001–2014)

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-154
Author(s):  
Paul Chaisty ◽  
Stephen Whitefield
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Public Opinion Survey ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Regime Support ◽  
Mass Level

Drawing on surveys conducted in Russia from 2001 to 2014, this article considers citizens’ conceptions of the nation in the Putin period; whether views of the nation have been shaped by political, economic and social developments over this 15 year period; and the correlates of these national perspectives in terms of regime support and political mobilization. We find, first, that understandings of the nation are multidimensional at the mass level, and in part reflect the main nationalist discourses in Russia. Second, we describe how contextual changes over this period – political, economic and social – relate to the ways in which the nation is understood. Third, we consider how different understandings of the nation connect to political attitudes and behaviors. The findings of this research have implications for how we should analyze nationalism and its bases of support in Putin’s Russia.

Latent Constructs in Public Opinion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Warshaw
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Knowledge ◽  
Racial Prejudice ◽  
Consumer Confidence ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Latent Constructs ◽  
Survey Questions ◽  
The Individual

Many of the most important constructs in public opinion research are abstract, latent quantities that cannot be directly observed from individual questions on surveys. Examples include ideology, political knowledge, racial prejudice, and consumer confidence. In each of these examples, individual survey questions are merely noisy indicators of the theoretical quantities that scholars are interested in measuring. This chapter describes a number of approaches for measuring latent constructs such as these at both the individual and group levels. It also discusses a number of substantive applications of latent constructs in public opinion research. Finally, it discusses methodological frontiers in the measurement of latent constructs.

scholarly journals Standards and scoring to increase transparency for archived public opinion data

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen Weldon
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
American Association ◽  
Implementation Process ◽  
Professional Organizations ◽  
Opinion Survey ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Public Opinion Survey ◽  
Disclosure Requirements ◽  
Policies And Procedures ◽  
Automatic Scoring

Faced with increased diversification of methodologies in the polling industry, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research Center is embarking on a major initiative aimed at increasing methodological transparency across the field of public opinion survey research by increasing minimum disclosure requirements and providing users with transparency scoring for new submissions to the archive. Roper Center, the world’s largest archive of public opinion survey data, has long enforced disclosure requirements for archival submissions based on transparency standards developed by professional organizations in the polling industry, particularly the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR). Roper Center’s new requirements and scoring mechanism expand longstanding policies and procedures to better meet the challenges of today’s research environment.In this paper, Roper Center’s new standards will be described in the context of the historical development of transparency expectations in the polling community. The paper presentation will also detail the implementation process, providing an account of how standards were translated into actionable DDI-based metadata to drive an automatic scoring system, how new workflows were developed with input from data providers to facilitate maximum disclosure, and how the display of the user interface was designed to ensure the transparency information can be easily viewed and understood.

scholarly journals Interviewer Effect on the Survey Data in Lithuania: Analysis of Three Surveys

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ainė Ramonaitė
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Multilevel Modelling ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Public Opinion Surveys ◽  
Interviewer Effect ◽  
International Comparative

The article analyses the interviewer effect on the data of three public opinion surveys on political attitudes of the population conducted in Lithuania. The study discusses why in international comparative studies Lithuania stands out for its extremely high interviewer effect, which raises serious doubts about the reliability and suitability of the data for analysis. The article, first, reviews the reasons for the interviewer effect and the methods of its measurement and, second, presents the results of multilevel modelling. The analysis of surveys conducted by three different public opinion research agencies reveals that the interviewer effect varies significantly depending on the research agency. The hypotheses on the differences in the interviewer effect related to the nature of the questions were not confirmed, but it was found that the interviewer effect was greater on more abstract and complex questions. In the conclusions, the recommendations for researchers working with surveys on how to control the interviewer effect are provided.

scholarly journals Public Opinion in Affluent Democracies

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Russell J. Dalton
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Political Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Consumer Confidence ◽  
Research Topics ◽  
Public Opinion Research ◽  
Additional Information

Public-opinion research ranges from political attitudes to understanding family life in sociology to consumer confidence surveys in economics. This article covers some of the major resources for studying and understanding opinions on political topics in the United States and other affluent democracies. It describes the major books on the content and methodology of public-opinion research as a guide to current scholarship. In addition, the article includes information on primary resources and journals emphasizing research on political attitudes. Many of the large-scale US and international public-opinion projects also provide the survey data and additional information on their research topics, and these projects are listed in the various sections of the article.

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