Public Opinion Reporting in the Vidette

As Thomas mentioned as we were gearing up to start class earlier, today's issue of the Daily Vidette reports on a Pew survey about public support for abortion. You can read CNN's coverage of the survey here and the full report from Pew here (pdf).

Ambiguous Question Wording and Irresponsible Reporting

Here's a recent post from the Monkey Cage blog that brings together two polling problems we've discussed in class recently in its criticism of a recent Gallup poll report: wording poll questions ambiguously (in this case, by asking respondents about government promotion of "traditional values"), so that too much is left up to the interpretation of individual respondents, and reporting on poll results in a way that overstates their findings. In related news, this post on the Washington Post's "Behind the Numbers" blog highlights the importance of comparing different polls on the same topic (in this case, abortion) before drawing hasty conclusions about critical shifts in public opinion.

Media and Polling Resources

Here's the video interview we watched in class today:



AAPOR's disclosure standards are available here. You might also want to check out the related FAQs page and new checklist and sample disclosure form. The complete article with the NCPP's 20 questions for journalists writing about polls is here.

Finally, feel free to register for the News University online course on "Understanding and Interpreting Polls," which, as we saw in class, provides some guidelines for reporting on public opinion polls as well as a useful review of a lot of the "nuts and bolts of polling" topics we've been discussing the last few weeks.

When Respondents Lie

In class today, we talked about "social desirability response bias" (SDRB), or innacurate polling results stemming from respondents giving answers that make them seem "socially desirable" but are not necessarily true.

Here's a link to the Wall Street Journal article we discussed. Feel free to play around at the Project Implicit tests, which are available here.

Regarding the "Bradley Effect," you might take a look at some of the following resources, which are just a drop in the vast ocean of coverage this phenomenon received during and just after the 2008 election season:

• "A Brief History of the Bradley Effect" from Time
• "Will the Bradley Effect Be Obama's Downfall?" from ABC News
• "Ghost of Bradley Effect" from NPR's On the Media
• "The Disappearing Bradley Effect" from the Princeton Election Consortium blog
• "Goodbye, Bradley Effect" from the Boston Globe
• "Obama on the Bradley Effect" from CBS News:

Sample Size Calculator

(source)

As we discussed in class yesterday, sampling is the process of selecting a relatively small group of individuals whose opinions will be polled in order to draw conclusions about the opinions of the whole target population.

You can use this sample size calculator to determine how large your sample should be based on the size of your target population and the statistical confidence that is to be associated with your results. To find population sizes within the U.S., the Census Bureau is a good place to start.

Town Hall Protests and Public Opinion on Healthcare Reform

Here's a recent article by Anthony DiMaggio, an ISU alum and Ph.D. student at the University of Illinois, Chicago who currently teaches various courses in the Politics and Government Department. In it, he discusses the factors that may be influencing current, rapid shifts in public opinion about healthcare reform in the United States, including especially the Town Hall protests and media coverage of them and the issue more generally.

He also touches on the role of public opinion polls themselves play in "limiting debate" about healthcare reform through their choice of which policy options to include in their questionnaires -- a point closely related to one Jimmy raised in his presentation about public opinion on same sex marriage in class today.

What Explains the Age Gap in Support for Same-Sex Marriage?

In a recent post on the "Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science" blog, Columbia University Professor Andrew Gelman discusses some analysis he's done with public opinion data from the Annenberg Public Policy Center on support for same-sex marriage (among other things) across different age groups.

One of his more surprising findings is that although young adults are considerably more supportive of state laws that would allow same-sex marriage than middle-aged ones, they're not more likely to report knowing someone who's gay, which suggests that a commonly asserted explanation for young adults' relative support for same-sex marriage -- that they're more likely to know, and therefore sympathize with, people who are most directly affected by same-sex marriage legislation -- is probably not as useful as it seems at first glance.

You can read the full post for more information about the wording of the questions that were used to elicit the data for Dr. Gelman's analysis and what he plans to do next to try to get a better handle on what explains the age gap in support for state laws allowing same-sex marriage. The reader comments at the bottom of the page also raise some interesting possibilities about why the data look the way they do and what underlying explanations might be driving them.

Misleading Charts and Graphs

As I mentioned in class today, ISU's own Professor Gary Klass maintains a website of misleading charts and graphs. You can view them all, along with his comments about why they're "bad charts" and what might have been done to make them more informative here. His site also has some tips for using Microsoft Excel to generate charts here.

Welcome to POL 312!

POL 312, Public Opinion, is an upper-level political science course that has the overarching objective of helping you become a more sophisticated consumer of research and reporting on the American public's attitudes and beliefs about public policy and political discourse, personalities, and events.

I'll be using this blog to provide access to Internet materials introduced in class, let you know about other resources that might come in handy for your issue blogs and portfolio materials, and occasionally comment on public-opinion-related current events.

I'm looking forward to meeting you all in class tomorrow (Tuesday, August 18) at 11 AM in 207 Schroeder Hall. In the meantime, feel free to check out the syllabus (pdf) and/or email me at sgelbman@ilstu.edu if you have any questions or concerns.