A preliminary study of prosocial or healthy teasing of stuttering: public opinion in the USA and Iran

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a large, initially uncontrollable, public health crisis both in the United States and across the world, with experts looking to vaccines as the ultimate mechanism of defense. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. Hence, it is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance.ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to investigate public opinion and perception on COVID-19 vaccines in the United States. We investigated the spatiotemporal trends of public sentiment and emotion towards COVID-19 vaccines and analyzed how such trends relate to popular topics found on Twitter.MethodsWe collected over 300,000 geotagged tweets in the United States from March 1, 2020 to February 28, 2021. We examined the spatiotemporal patterns of public sentiment and emotion over time at both national and state scales and identified 3 phases along the pandemic timeline with sharp changes in public sentiment and emotion. Using sentiment analysis, emotion analysis (with cloud mapping of keywords), and topic modeling, we further identified 11 key events and major topics as the potential drivers to such changes.ResultsAn increasing trend in positive sentiment in conjunction with a decrease in negative sentiment were generally observed in most states, reflecting the rising confidence and anticipation of the public towards vaccines. The overall tendency of the 8 types of emotion implies that the public trusts and anticipates the vaccine. This is accompanied by a mixture of fear, sadness, and anger. Critical social or international events or announcements by political leaders and authorities may have potential impacts on public opinion towards vaccines. These factors help identify underlying themes and validate insights from the analysis.ConclusionsThe analyses of near real-time social media big data benefit public health authorities by enabling them to monitor public attitudes and opinions towards vaccine-related information in a geo-aware manner, address the concerns of vaccine skeptics, and promote the confidence that individuals within a certain region or community have towards vaccines.

In studies of the Australian press, a wide range of American influences—on news genres, on notions of newsworthiness and presentation, and on the language in which stories are written—has been larg...

When is public opinion dictated and when does it dictate? This study examines the political-cultural determinants and consequences of defense spending policy focusing on the relationship between public opinion and military expenditures in the United States and Germany during the post-Cold War time-period. Specifically, it considers how defense policy directs public opinion through the manipulation of media effects, especially the glamorization of force. While these patterns are generally reciprocal, this study examines whether the latter will have a stronger unidirectional relationship in the United States rather than in Germany, with defense policy swaying public opinion via media manipulation. Therefore, in the United States, the institution type (independent variable) should sway military expenditures (dependent variable) more readily than both variables will persuade each other; in Germany this relationship should be more reciprocal. To test this question, we use budgetary figures from 2000 to 2020 along with public opinion data inspired by Hartley and Russett’s model from American and German sources to assess the direction of influence. We suspect that this pattern would be stronger in the United States due to a smaller number of political parties that creates an individualized pluralism where presidents prosper from a direct mode of public appeal rather than from traditional bargaining techniques of institutionalized pluralism. We found that public opinion shapes military expenditures in Germany and the opposite holds true in the United States, with policymakers shaping public opinion rather than reflecting it.

For all their faults, public opinion polls are of great importance to public policymaking, especially on issues that are highly visible and controversial. In the context of capital punishment, researchers have repeatedly documented the strong relationship that exists among public, judicial, and legislative opinion. During the past two decades, popular public opinion poll results in the United States have shown considerable growth in the support of capital punishment. Although criticized as grossly overly simplistic, these polls are often employed to show that legislative and judicial decision making is “grounded” in consensual public opinion. A number of studies have questioned the validity of opinion polls as measures of attitudes on this issue—with apparent support for capital punishment dropping precipitously when alternative options, such as life imprisonment with absolutely no possibility of parole, are provided. The present article suggests that we are misinterpreting poll information in a more basic way—by effectively dissuading a “no opinion“ response through the use of a standard “no filter” question format. Even without providing additional information or alternatives to respondents, the present research suggests that reliance on standard questions that simply seek a favor/oppose response can overestimate support for and opposition to the death penalty. More important, the number of people with no clear opinion on this issue can almost double, simply by employing a different question format. Put simply, one of the most important determinants of public opinion on the death penalty is the way in which we pose the question.

Objective: Legislation is an effective strategy for reducing road-related fatalities and injuries. Public opinion can be an impetus for passing new laws and can affect the success of their implementation, but little is known about the current state of public opinion toward existing and proposed road-related policies in the United States. This review describes the scope and results of research on public support for state- and local-level evidence-based motor vehicle– and bicycle-related policies. We identify gaps in our understanding of public support for these policies. Methods: Published U.S. literature and all reports from the NHTSA from the past decade (2003–2012) were searched for data on opinions about existing or proposed policies related to motor vehicle or bicycle injury prevention. Twenty-six studies fulfilled the inclusion criteria. In all, studies reported public opinion about 7 injury prevention topic areas: all-terrain vehicles (n = 1), automated enforcement with red light and speed cameras (n = 5), distracted driving (n = 4), drinking and driving (n = 5), graduated driver licensing (n = 7), helmets (n = 7), and seat belts (n = 4). Twenty-three studies focused only on one topic, and 3 sought public opinion about multiple topic areas. Results: The studies revealed generally high levels of support for injury prevention policies in all topic areas. Fifteen studies collected information from national samples, and only 7 studies reported data from the state (n = 5) or local (n = 2) level. Conclusions: There is a relatively small evidence base on public opinion related to motor vehicle– and bicycle-related evidence-based policies; even less is less known for state- or county-specific policies. The findings of this review suggest that the public's opinion toward injury prevention legislation is generally favorable. This information can be used to communicate with the media and policy makers to reinforce the need for effective policy solutions to continuing motor vehicle injury problems. More research is needed to understand the perspectives of those who do not hold favorable opinions, to understand opinions toward local or state-level policies, and to monitor trends in public opinion over time. Supplemental materials are available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Traffic Injury Prevention to view the supplemental file.

Public opinion plays an unprecedented role in foreign policy making in Africa as well as in other advanced and sophisticated nations in the international system. However, in the United States of America and Nigeria, empirical evidence shows that public opinion has little or no significant effects on foreign policy decision-making. Several reasons abound for this, some of these reasons are the unwillingness of the political elites to embrace transparency, accountability, and inclusive governance. The study therefore examines the views of scholars on the role of public opinion in foreign policy making in the United States of America and Nigeria. The secondary source of data collection was adopted, data include archival materials, periodical publications, books, and the internet. Most of these materials were sourced through an extensive use of specialized library facilities of the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA). The research is descriptive and analytical. The study recommends that the American and Nigerian governments should encourage public opinion in foreign policy making. The researcher also recommend that scholars of International Relations should focus in their research on the role of Government in allowing the input of the public in both domestic and international politics. Keywords: Public Opinion, Foreign Policy, policy, United States of America, Nigeria.

Countries have been developing renewable energies for quite some time now, and people are starting to think of them as being affordable, readily available, and good for the environment. The time has come to develop wave energy. Governments around the world are finally seeing the benefits of its unstoppable grace and power and are starting to account for it in their renewable energy portfolios. There is one huge potential problem, however, and that is "public acceptability". Even though public acceptability is not a new phenomenon - it has often been encountered with new technologies and even new things there is one unique factor this time. It is the common space hugging the continents called the ocean. The traditional ocean uses, especially within three miles of the coastline in the U.S., do not include energy extraction. The question becomes how this new need for harnessing ocean power and turning it into electricity is going to fit within the existing array of ocean uses - fishing, recreation, transportation, aesthetics, and marine life conservation. The state of Oregon, U.S.A., has been identified as the most suitable place for wave energy development of all 23 coastal states in the United States. Today, however, almost five years after the EPRI study was published, there is not a single commercial wave energy project in the waters off Oregon. Why? Does public opinion have anything to do with it? How should public opinion be interpreted? This study provides some insight and understanding about the determinants of public opinion with regard to renewable energy, the role these determinants play in public opinion formulation, and their relative importance in citizens' support of or opposition toward wave energy development in Oregon. The findings of a statewide survey reveal that the typical respondent is supportive of wave energy development, even though s/he does not consider herself/himself well informed about renewable energy, and that s/he is least knowledgeable about wave energy of all renewable options. These results indicate that increased outreach efforts for wave energy are warranted; especially considering the fact that 83% of respondents believe it is "possible to increase energy supplies while protecting the environment at the same time".

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in generating human-like responses, prompting exploration into their potential for social science research. "Silicon sampling," a method where LLMs are queried after being prompted with personas, has emerged as a possible alternative to traditional survey methods, especially given the increasing challenges associated with declining survey participation rates and rising costs. However, the accuracy of silicon sampling remains a subject of debate.This study examines the effectiveness of silicon sampling in replicating survey results on public acceptance toward facial recognition technology (FRT). The research builds upon the work of Kostka et al. (2021)*, who conducted a multinational survey across Germany, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States, analyzing public opinion on FRT alongside socio-demographic data and key contextual factors, including perceived consequences, utility, and reliability of the technology.The study addresses two research questions: (1) Can LLMs simulate an individual's surveyed opinions on FRT when prompted with a persona using only demographic information? (2) Can LLMs simulate an individual's surveyed opinions on FRT when prompted with a persona using both demographic and relevant contextual information?The research employs three LLMs: GPT-4o, Claude 3.5, and the open-source DeepSeek V3. It compares the LLM-generated responses to the original survey data, assessing the degree of alignment under three prompting conditions: demographic-only, contextual information-only, and demographic-plus-contextual information. To initially evaluate alignment, the differences between the percentages of each level of FRT acceptance were calculated. Additional metrics such as accuracy, mean absolute error, and F1-Scores are included in the extended paper. Preliminary results from GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 suggest that prompts incorporating both demographic and contextual information yield simulated responses that closely align with the original survey data. Consistent with prior findings, prompts based solely on demographics produce significantly less accurate results. By comparing closed-source models (GPT and Claude) with an open-source alternative (DeepSeek), the study also examines potential differences in reliability between these types of models. Multiple runs for each model are included to assess output variability and reproducibility within and between models.By demonstrating the importance of incorporating relevant contextual information into prompts, the study provides valuable insights into optimizing the silicon sampling technique and the accuracy of LLM-generated responses in survey simulations. Ultimately, this investigation advances the understanding of the capabilities and limitations of LLMs as tools for studying public opinion, particularly in the context of technology acceptance, and informs the development of best practices for utilizing silicon sampling in future research. The results suggest that, with careful prompting, silicon sampling can offer a viable and cost-effective alternative to traditional survey methods, potentially mitigating challenges related to declining response rates and increasing costs.*Kostka, G., Steinacker, L., & Meckel, M. (2021). Between security and convenience: Facial recognition technology in the eyes of citizens in China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Public Understanding of Science, 30(6), 671–690. https://doi.org/10.1177/09636625211001555

Ten Thousand Democracies: Politics and Public Opinion in America's School Districts – By Michael Berkman and Eric Plutzer School's in: Federalism and the National Education Agenda – By Paul Manna

Presidential Power, the Panay Incident, and the Defeat of the Ludlow Amendment

Book Reviews 669 Reading Public Opinion: How Political Actors View the Democratic Process. By Susan Herbst. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; pp. χ + 256. $16.00. Following her much acclaimed 1993 book, Numbered Voices: How Opinion Polling has Shaped American Politics, Susan Herbst seeks to broaden our conceptions of public opinion and its role in democratic governance. She goes beyond simple public opinion polling to consider the many ways in which political professionals and activists assess and understand citizens' preferences. Through depth interviews and surveys, she analyzes the "lay theories" of the politically active and reveals how polled opinions play only a minor role in democratic policy making. Herbst draws from a wide range of past scholarship, including early studies of public opinion and group formation, postmodern theories, cultural studies, political science, and communications in order to lay the foundation for her argument that public opinion is socially constructed and affected by institutions, technology, and political culture. In contrast to much of the experimentally based literature on political cognition which fails to take account of culture, language, and experience, Reading Public Opinion employs a rhetorical psychological approach and depth interviews which clearly demonstrate the pragmatic ways political actors evaluate public opinion. Herbst's data come from a case study of Illinois state government. She conducted depth interviews with 44 working political professionals and party activists: legislative staff members, reporters who covered the Illinois capitol, and Illinois delegates to the 1996 Democratic and Republican party conventions. These rich qualitative data were supplemented with a survey of 528 convention delegates from across the United States. Using interpretive methods for querying her informants and analyzing their discourse , Herbst convincingly demonstrates the sharply contrasting views of public opinion held by these three differently situated groups of participants in the policymaking process. For the staff members interviewed in this study, two indicators of public opinion were particularly relevant: interest group communications and the content of the mass media. The journalists, on the other hand, talked about public opinion in terms of interpersonal dialogue and conversations with citizens. The party activists relied on yet another conception of public opinion and were more comfortable with public opinions expressed through polls and through conversations with friends and acquaintances. Drawing on the language of her informants, Herbst adeptly demonstrates how one's location in the social and political world constrains the ways in which public opinion is constructed. Her informants view public opinion in very pragmatic, instrumental terms that are shaped by their professional roles. For example, staffers discuss public opinion in terms of "which segments of the public will react to a legislative maneuver and how such reactions will become manifest" (153). Public opinion , as measured by polls, is not particularly useful. Polls are not conducted 670 Rhetoric & Public Affairs regularly on statewide issues. Moreover, polls capture only a fleeting snapshot of the public mood and fail to communicate the intensity, directional dynamic, and organization of opinion which are necessary to formulate politically successful policy. Interest groups and journalists are far better situated to articulate public sentiments for staff members because they are informed, accessible, and perceived as able to persuade an otherwise amorphous and indifferent public. Interestingly, staff members rely on interest groups and media to convey public opinion despite their acknowledged biases. Staffers think of themselves as knowledgeable enough to "'see through' media bias and still glean some useful data about public opinion" (72). The political roles of journalists and party activists are quite different from those of legislative staff members, as are their conceptions of public opinion. Herbst argues, however, that understanding each actor's position in the democratic process explains the observed variations in definitions of public opinion. Journalists' views of public opinion as conversation with citizens/readers fit in with their anti-authority bias in political coverage. Party activists see public opinion as aggregations of individual opinions either through conversations or polling. The activists' disregard for interest group and media related expressions of public opinion is completely consistent with their roles as delegates representing citizens' opinions to the political leadership of their respective parties. Although convention delegates' views on public opinion are interesting to examine and help to broaden the inquiry beyond the...

Palliative and end-of-life care (PEoLC) played a critical role in relieving distress and providing grief support in response to the heavy toll caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, little is known about public opinions concerning PEoLC during the pandemic. Given that social media have the potential to collect real-time public opinions, an analysis of this evidence is vital to guide future policy-making. This study aimed to use social media data to investigate real-time public opinions regarding PEoLC during the COVID-19 crisis and explore the impact of vaccination programs on public opinions about PEoLC. This Twitter-based study explored tweets across 3 English-speaking countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. From October 2020 to March 2021, a total of 7951 PEoLC-related tweets with geographic tags were retrieved and identified from a large-scale COVID-19 Twitter data set through the Twitter application programming interface. Topic modeling realized through a pointwise mutual information-based co-occurrence network and Louvain modularity was used to examine latent topics across the 3 countries and across 2 time periods (pre- and postvaccination program periods). Commonalities and regional differences among PEoLC topics in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada were identified specifically: cancer care and care facilities were of common interest to the public across the 3 countries during the pandemic; the public expressed positive attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine and highlighted the protection it affords to PEoLC professionals; and although Twitter users shared their personal experiences about PEoLC in the web-based community during the pandemic, this was more prominent in the United States and Canada. The implementation of the vaccination programs raised the profile of the vaccine discussion; however, this did not influence public opinions about PEoLC. Public opinions on Twitter reflected a need for enhanced PEoLC services during the COVID-19 pandemic. The insignificant impact of the vaccination program on public discussion on social media indicated that public concerns regarding PEoLC continued to persist even after the vaccination efforts. Insights gleaned from public opinions regarding PEoLC could provide some clues for policy makers on how to ensure high-quality PEoLC during public health emergencies. In this post-COVID-19 era, PEoLC professionals may wish to continue to examine social media and learn from web-based public discussion how to ease the long-lasting trauma caused by this crisis and prepare for public health emergencies in the future. Besides, our results showed social media's potential in acting as an effective tool to reflect public opinions in the context of PEoLC.

Ask a Political Scientist: A Conversation with Katherine J. Cramer about Listening as a Way of Democratic and Scholarly Life

Deliberative democracy and the digital public sphere: Asymmetrical fragmentation as a political not a technological problem

Purpose: The purpose of this article was to analyze effect of effects of news framing on public opinion in United States. Methodology: This study adopted a desk methodology. A desk study research design is commonly known as secondary data collection. This is basically collecting data from existing resources preferably because of its low cost advantage as compared to a field research. Our current study looked into already published studies and reports as the data was easily accessed through online journals and libraries. Findings: News framing significantly influences public opinion in the United States by shaping how individuals interpret political, social, and economic issues. Frames emphasizing benefits tend to garner support, while those highlighting risks often lead to opposition. Framing can also reinforce existing biases, aligning public opinion with pre-existing views. Overall, news framing plays a key role in guiding public attitudes and political behaviors. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: Framing theory, agenda-setting theory & cognitive dissonance theory may be used to anchor future studies on the effects of news framing on public opinion in United States. Media organizations should prioritize ethical reporting, ensuring that framing does not promote bias or contribute to polarization. Policymakers should consider regulating media ownership to prevent monopolization of news sources that could lead to biased or one-sided framing of issues.