The polls: poll trends. AIDS--an update.

Abstract

This summary of public opinion about acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) updates our earlier review (Singer, Rogers, and Corcoran 1987). Since then, there has been a dramatic increase in public information about AIDS. The Surgeon General's Report on AIDS was released in 1986, and figures compiled by the Centers for Disease Control indicate that media coverage of the disease surged in 1987, with a total of 11,852 stories, up sharply from approximately 5,000 stories each in 1986 and 1985. In early 1988, the federal government mounted a nationwide campaign to inform the public about AIDS, in particular about ways to prevent its spread. One consequence of this information explosion seems to have been a large increase in the number of people who feel they know a lot about the disease; the percentage giving this response more than doubled between 1987 and 1991. The number of media stories on AIDS in 1988, 1989, and 19907,584, 7,091, and 8,364, respectively-did not match the nearly 12,000 in 1987. But 1991 figures indicate the highest media interest yet13,209 stories. Nearly half (6,038) appeared in the last quarter of the year, which is when Magic Johnson, the superstar Los Angeles Lakers basketball player, announced that he was HIV positive. The total for the first two quarters of 1992 remained high: 7,981 stories, evidence that the media continue to find AIDS highly newsworthy. For this review, we assembled national surveys from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research that had asked one or more questions about AIDS. Between January 1987 and July 1992, our cutoff date, we identified 116 such surveys: 27 in 1987, 13 in 1988, 9 in 1989, 24 in