Diversity, Seasonality, and Context of Mammalian Roadkills in the Southern Great Plains
In: Environmental management: an international journal for decision makers, scientists, and environmental auditors, Band 41, Heft 6, S. 844-852
ISSN: 1432-1009
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In: Environmental management: an international journal for decision makers, scientists, and environmental auditors, Band 41, Heft 6, S. 844-852
ISSN: 1432-1009
In: Political studies: the journal of the Political Studies Association of the United Kingdom, Band 58, Heft 1, S. 66-84
ISSN: 1467-9248
It has long been suspected that, when asked to provide opinions on matters of public policy, significant numbers of those surveyed do so with only the vaguest understanding of the issues in question. In this article, we present the results of a study which demonstrates that a significant minority of the British public are, in fact, willing to provide evaluations of non-existent policy issues. In contrast to previous American research, which has found such responses to be most prevalent among the less educated, we find that the tendency to provide 'pseudo-opinions' is positively correlated with self-reported interest in politics. This effect is itself moderated by the context in which the political interest item is administered; when this question precedes the fictitious issue item, its effect is greater than when this order is reversed. Political knowledge, on the other hand, is associated with a lower probability of providing pseudo-opinions, though this effect is weaker than that observed for political interest. Our results support the view that responses to fictitious issue items are not generated at random, via some 'mental coin flip' . Instead, respondents actively seek out what they consider to be the likely meaning of the question and then respond in their own terms, through the filter of partisan loyalties and current political discourses.
In: International journal of public opinion research, Band 22, Heft 1, S. 74-92
ISSN: 1471-6909
In: Journal of ethnic and migration studies: JEMS, Band 12, Heft 1, S. 66-74
ISSN: 1469-9451
In: Journal of ethnic and migration studies: JEMS, Band 9, Heft 2, S. 182-193
ISSN: 1469-9451
In: Sociological methods and research, Band 43, Heft 1, S. 15-38
ISSN: 1552-8294
A persistent problem in the design of bipolar attitude questions is whether or not to include a middle response alternative. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that people might hold opinions which are `neutral' with regard to issues of public controversy. On the other, question designers suspect that offering a mid-point may attract respondents with no opinion, or those who lean to one side of an issue but do not wish to incur the cognitive costs required to determine a directional response. Existing research into the effects of offering a middle response alternative has predominantly used a split-ballot design, in which respondents are assigned to conditions which offer or omit a midpoint. While this body of work has been useful in demonstrating that offering or excluding a mid-point substantially influences the answers respondents provide, it does not offer any clear resolution to the question of which format yields more accurate data. In this paper, we use a different approach. We use follow-up probes administered to respondents who initially select the mid-point to determine whether they selected this alternative in order to indicate opinion neutrality, or to indicate that they do not have an opinion on the issue. We find the vast majority of responses turn out to be what we term `face-saving don't knows' and that reallocating these responses from the mid-point to the don't know category significantly alters descriptive and multivariate inferences. Counter to the survey-satisficing perspective, we find that those with this tendency is greatest amongst those who express more interest in the topic area.
We present the results of a survey experiment in which we manipulate the order that respondents are administered vote choice and economic evaluation items. Our findings add to the growing body of evidence which suggests that survey respondents tacitly align evaluations of the national economy with previously stated attitudes and behaviour. Our results have implications for theories of economic voting and for the design of national election study questionnaires.
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In: Survey research methods: SRM, Band 3, Heft 1, S. 7-12
ISSN: 1864-3361
"The authors present the results of a survey experiment in which we manipulate the order that respondents are administered vote choice and economic evaluation items. The author's findings add to the growing body of evidence which suggests that survey respondents tacitly align evaluations of the national economy with previously stated attitudes and behaviour. Their results have implications for theories of economic voting and for the design of national election study questionnaires." (author's abstract)
In: The public opinion quarterly: POQ, Band 72, Heft 1, S. 90-102
ISSN: 1537-5331
In: Public opinion quarterly: journal of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Band 72, Heft 1, S. 90-102
ISSN: 0033-362X
In: Public Opinion Quarterly, Band 72, Heft 1, S. 90-102
SSRN
In: Journal of elections, public opinion and parties, Band 25, Heft 4, S. 530-542
ISSN: 1745-7297
The opinion polls undertaken prior to the 2015 UK General Election under-estimated the Conservative lead over Labour by an average of 7 percentage points. This collective failure led politicians and commentators to question the validity and utility of political polling and raised concerns regarding a broader public loss of confidence in survey research. In this paper, we assess the likely causes of the 2015 polling errors. We begin by setting out a formal account of the statistical methodology and assumptions required for valid estimation of party vote shares using quota sampling. We then describe the current approach of polling organisations for estimating sampling variability and suggest a new method based on bootstrap re-sampling. Next, we use poll micro-data to assess the plausibility of different explanations of the polling errors. Our conclusion is that the primary cause of the polling errors in 2015 was unrepresentative sampling.
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