Survey Practice
The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) has launched Survey Practice, an on-line magainze intended to “provide good, sound information to new survey researchers, be relatively flexible, be able to address current issues, and be easy to read.”
See especially this piece by political scientists George Bishop and Stephen Mockabee, which documents how the public’s mood has not only grown more pessimistic — a widely known finding — but also become more strongly linked to its assessment of President Bush. Thus, the “meaning” of the public’s mood has changed somewhat over time, becoming more clearly a referendum on the Bush presidency rather than a more apolitical statement about the country.
Comments
My second comment in as many days! I couldn’t resist this one, since I was a discussant for this paper at the 2007 AAPOR. Their results are fascinating, but I think their claims about broader implications for survey research are overstated. They argue that when the correlates of a question change, the very meaning of the question changes as well, and that this critically undermines the question’s reliability. If this is true, then the whole literature on priming and framing is founded on a form of measurement error. Why can’t I mean the same thing at time 1 and time 2 when I say the country is headed in the wrong direction, yet see those problems as connected to Pres. Bush’s record at time 2 but not time 1?
Posted by: Eric McGhee | September 4, 2008 01:10 PM