Put yourself in a reporter's shoes

Until now, we've approached public opinion from the standpoint of the pollster -- that is, the individual whose role is to measure the public's attitudes and beliefs by designing, administering, and analyzing the results of public opinion polls. For Topic 3, we're switching gears

Interview Effects

The final source of potential innacuracy in public opinion polling that we'll consider in this course is the administration of a poll -- that is, the manner in which a questionnaire is presented to respondents and their answers are recorded.

Questionnaire Effects

So far, we've seen two potential sources of invalidity and unreliability in public opinion polls: (1) using sampling techniques that result in an unrepresentative samples, and (2) respondents misrepresenting their opinions, either by offering opinions when they don't in fact have any (i.e. nonattitudes) or by giving responses that they believe to be most socially desirable whether or not they're their true opinions (i.e. insincerity). This post considers a third possibility:

Nonattitudes and Insincerity

Validity and Reliability

This YouTube clip, which was posted by a student at the University of Texas, does a pretty good job explaining the concepts of validity and reliability:

Sampling

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Modern public opinion polling depends critically on sampling for its viability, since it rests on the assumption that we can learn about what the public as a whole thinks by asking just a fraction of its members. To get a better feel for how this works, consider these questions:

Measuring Public Opinion

Our first full unit is devoted to the question of how we know what the American public thinks about politics -- in other words, how we measure public opinion.

Public Opinion and Its Attributes

As suggested by the course description on the website and in the overview unit's first required text, our overarching concern is with "public opinion," which refers to the sum total (or "aggregation") of the beliefs and attitudes held by a population as a whole.

Welcome to POL 312 Online!

POL 312, Public Opinion, is an upper-level political science course whose overarching objective is to help you become a more sophisticated consumer of academic research and media reporting on the American public's political attitudes and beliefs.

This summer, POL 312 is being offered as a fully online course. This blog will serve in lieu of class lectures. Throughout the four-week session, I'll be using this space to contextualize and expound upon the required texts, explain key terms and concepts, point out "breaking news" developments that relate to our subject matter, and raise questions for you to think about. Feel free to use the "comments" feature to ask questions, request clarifications, take a stab at responding to discussion questions, and/or respond to your classmates' comments.

The course website is available here. If you have any questions or concerns, you can contact me via email at sgelbman@ilstu.edu.