Suchergebnisse

We report the results of a new survey of the American public to explore cosmological beliefs and the reasons for those beliefs. We find that cosmological knowledge is associated with age, gender, education, and membership in a church or religious organization. The majority of people believe that the universe is static. In reaction to the idea of an expanding universe, some respondents expressed fear of unknown change and danger to earth. The identification of such factors may provide insight into the psychological and social environment in which science is done.

Ansolabehere and Hersh and others have examined the reported voting behavior of survey respondents using a variety of validation methods, including matching with national voter files provided by outside vendors. This analysis provides the first examination of a thirty-year national longitudinal study and compares the insights obtained from this longitudinal analysis to two 2016 national cross-sectional studies of voting behavior using structural equation modeling. We find that respondents of the longitudinal study overreport at lower rates than respondents in our 2016 samples, and the traditional predictors of overreporting such as political interest, engagement, and partisanship predict overreporting among respondents in both our longitudinal and 2016 short-term panel studies, but our longitudinal data include novel predictors of overreporting such as parent socialization factors. We conclude with a discussion of the phenomenon of overreporting in surveys and how survey accuracy becomes increasingly important for both the public and policymakers in an era of decreasing trust in institutions and expertise.