Clergyman, Cleric, and Religious Leader: An Experiment on Alternative Reference Individuals for the Free Expression Items
Following upon the foundational work of Samuel Stouffer in his 1955 book Communism, Conformity, and Civil Liberties, the General Social Survey (GSS) has measured support for free expression in the United States since 1972. In this report, I offer two sets of results to inform decisions about the questionnaire for the 2020 GSS. First, to set the background, I use GSS data from 2008 through 2018 to summarize levels and changes in attitudes toward free expression for all six existing reference individuals on the GSS. Second, I offer results from a three-armed experiment that compares the existing reference individual of a “Muslim clergyman” to two alternatives: “Islamic cleric” and “Islamic religious leader.” The experimental data were collected over the web in January and February of 2019 as part of the AmeriSpeak panel.