Survey Research Center Research Articles

Question Wording and Partisanship: Change and Continuity in Party Loyalties During the 1992 Election Campaign

Gallup macropartisanship varies more over time than aggregate measures of partisanship employing the standard Michigan Survey Research Center (SRC) party identification measure, but previous analyses do not provide direct evidence about why Gallup macropartisanship is more variable. Although these differences could result from the short-term focus of the Gallup party affiliation question, aggregate-level analyses cannot test the effects of question wording directly. Between March and October 1992, we conducted a series of question-wording experiments, employing six statewide computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) surveys of Michigan adults, including a four-wave panel study. Our analyses strongly suggest that the Gallup measure responds more to short-term political conditions and clearly demonstrate that the Gallup measure is less stable over time. These individual-level results help explain why Gallup macropartisanship varies more over time than aggregate measures of partisanship employing the standard SRC measure and raise questions about the degree to which one can generalize from analyses using the Gallup data to the research literature on party identification.

Political Parties: The Missing Variable in Women and Politics Research

An explosion in the literature on women and politics has been stimulated by the contemporary women's movement. This paper argues that an early diversity in theoretical orientation and methodology has been replaced by a narrow orthodoxy characterized by the use of polling and the survey method, and the theoretical voting behavior model employed by the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. Left out of this approach is the study of political parties as organizations-a variable presented here as essential to the study of women in politics. The image of parties in women and politics scholarship is surveyed, as are the theoretical implications of ignoring women's gains in political parties in such studies.

An Exploratory Study of the Factors Associated with Parental Saving for Postsecondary Education

Spurious Elements in Measured Real Income Saving. American Economic Review, 70 (1980), 990-1004. 33. Manski, C. F., and D. A. Wise. College Choice in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Howard University Press, 1983. 34. Merisotis, J. P. An Inventory of Innovative Financing Plans to Help Pay for Higher Education. In New Ways of Paying for College, edited by Arthur M. Hauptman and Robert M. Koff. New York: American Council on Education/Macmillan Publishing Company, 1991. Introduction The growing federal deficit and increased competition for public dollars have resulted in increased interest in alternative methods for financing society's and personal costs of postsecondary education. Questions have been raised about the effects of federal financial aid upon student access |19~. Alternative methods of providing loans have also been proposed |10, pp. 21, 24~. The State of Massachusetts has enacted legislation to encourage parental saving |14~. Guaranteed tuition plans, such as the plan adopted in Michigan, are also examples of attempts to stimulate parental saving |34~. Recent interest in stimulating parental saving for postsecondary education suggests that policy makers view saving as a substitute for federal and state loans and other forms of financial aid for middle-income families. Baum |3~ discusses the rationale for returning more responsibility to parents for financing the postsecondary education of their children. In 1986 the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan conducted a survey of consumer finances. Survey results indicated that only 34 percent of families with children under eighteen years of age who planned to send their children to college had savings specifically designated for college expenses |43~. Although interest in stimulating Parental saving for postsecondary education is increasing, there is a dearth of research on the extent of parental saving for postsecondary education and the factors associated with parental saving. This exploratory study examines factors associated with parental saving for postsecondary education. Purpose In an effort to shed light on parental saving, this article examines parental saving behaviors. Using student and parent data from a longitudinal study employing multiple surveys over a three-year period, logistic regression was used to identify the factors most strongly associated with parental saving for postsecondary education. In addition, insights gained from the interviews of a small subsample of students and parents who were interviewed five times during the three-year period are used to further examine parental saving. This exploratory study examines the following questions: 1. To what extent are parents saving for postsecondary education? 2. What factors are associated with parental saving? 3. Do certain kinds of information appear to influence parental saving? Insights into these questions can assist public policy makers in determining the most effective interventions to stimulate parental saving. A Perspective on Parental Saving for Postsecondary Education There is little previous empirical work on the factors associated with parental saving for postsecondary education. However, economists have been concerned about parental household savings since the emergence of capitalist economies and especially since the industrial revolution |1, 2, 8, 20, 38~. Drawing upon previous econometric studies and research on college choice, we posit that parental saving for postsecondary education is a function of the financial ability to save, parental motivation to save, parental postsecondary aspirations for their children, and the ability of their children to benefit from postsecondary education. Based upon research on household savings and student college choice we have identified factors that might be expected to influence parental saving. These factors include an array of variables which we have grouped under the categories of background characteristics, student and parental aspirations and activities, and information and incentives. …

Collective Memories in Britain and the United States

Collective Memories in Britain and the United States

Meeting the Challenge of Answering Machines

Answering machines have become one of the major challenges to obtaining high response rates in telephone surveys. This article presents some data that may be helpful in answering two questions that frequently arise: (1) What are the chances that additional calls to a household known to use an answering machine will result in a completed interview? (2) When is the best time to call, in order to minimize the chances of encountering an answering machine? The data used to analyze these questions are based on the calling records of the 1990 California Disability Survey, a large random-digit dialing survey that generated about 330,000 calls and completed interviews at over 24,000 households. This large number of calls is interesting not only in absolute terms but because of the high number of callbacks that they represent, designed to bring the response rate up over 80 percent. The records of calls analyzed here, consequently, can show convincingly what really happens when 10, 20, 30, or even more callbacks are attempted. Such opportunities are rare. Researchers can take advantage of these results to generate more informed calling strategies and consequently improve response rates in their surveys. Answering machines are becoming a major challenge for survey researchers to overcome. Although the exact percentage of households that have such machines is unknown, current estimates put the figure nationwide at about 25 percent-and rising (Tuckel and Feinberg 1991). For the California survey reported on here, an answering machine was encountered once or more at 31 percent of confirmed households, but many additional households may have had answering machines that did not happen to be in use when the interviewer called. THOMAS PIAZZA iS the manager of technical services at the Survey Research Center, University of California, Berkeley, and the coordinator for survey design and analysis in the Computer-assisted Survey Methods Program, also at the University of California, Berkeley. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 1992 annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, St. Petersburg Beach, FL. Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 57:219-231 ? by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/93/5702-0006$02.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.27 on Tue, 06 Sep 2016 06:00:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

Survey Evidence on Excessive Public Pessimism About the Future Behavior of Unemployment

Two of the questions in the Surveys of Consumer At- titudes undertaken by the Survey Research Center of the Univer- sity of Michigan deal with households' expectations about infla- tion and the change in unemployment. We compare quarterly time series of the mean responses with the actual behavior of inflation and unemployment to see whether households are overly optimistic or pessimistic about the future behavior of inflation and unemployment. We find an asymmetry. Over the 21 years of our analysis, on average the public is neither overly optimistic nor overly pessimistic about future inflation. However, the public has been significantly too pessimistic about the future behavior of unemployment. These results have an important implication for macroeconomic policy. If politicians respond to complaints from the public about inflation and unemployment they will target policy instruments at unemployment to a greater extent than if the public was not so pessimistic about the behavior of unemploy- ment. The result may be a higher rate of inflation than if the public were not mistakenly pessimistic about the behavior of un- employment.

BOOK REVIEWS

Book review in this ArticleAcid Soil and Acid Rain (2nd edition) By I.R. Kennedy.Proposals for the Classification, Description and Mapping of Soils in Urban Areas By J.M. Hollis (Soil Survey and Land Research Centre).

The Quality of Record Keeping and Racial Differences in Validated Turnout

The election administration studies and the vote validation studies conducted as part of the 1986 and 1988 National Election Studies are employed to determine whether the tendency of blacks more often to overreport voting than whites results from the poor quality of record keeping in election offices where black registration and voting records are maintained. Both objective indicators of record-keeping quality and the subjective assessments by the Survey Research Center field staff are employed. The analysis suggests that the tendency of blacks to overreport voting does not result from inferior record keeping in areas where blacks live.

Measurement errors in survey forecasts of expected inflation and the rationality of inflation expectations

Studies that use survey data to test the rationality of inflationary expectations usually test for unbiasedness by regressing actual inflation on expected inflation and testing the joint hypothesis that the intercept is zero and the slope coefficient is one. Such studies are fatally flawed because they incorrectly assume that expected inflation is measured without error. A procedure that allows for the influence of observation errors in expected inflation is developed and applied to the University of Michigan Survey Research Center data. Contrary to some recent studies, unbiasedness is rejected.

The relationship between forecast dispersion and forecast uncertainty: Evidence from a survey data—arch model

AbstractThis paper examines empirically the relationship between measures of forecast dispersion and forecast uncertainty from data on inflation expectations from the Livingston survey series and the Survey Research Center (SRC) survey series. Because the survey series do not provide probabilistic forecasts of inflation, we derive measures of inflation uncertainty by modelling the conditional variance of the inflation forecast errors from the survey series as an autoregressive conditional heteroscedastic (ARCH) process. The analysis is complicated by the fact that the overlap of forecast horizons for the survey series does not preclude the model's disturbance terms from displaying autocorrelation, and also places a restriction on the specification for the ARCH measures of inflation uncertainty. We estimate the model using Hansen's (1982) generalized method of moments (GMM) procedure to account for the presence of serial correlation and conditional heteroscedasticity in the disturbance terms. The results generally support the hypothesis that the measures of forecast dispersion across survey respondents are positively and statistically significantly associated with the measures of inflation uncertainty. However, the appropriateness of using forecast dispersion measures as proxies for inflation uncertainty is sensitive to the choice of the survey series.

Little White Lies and Social Science Models: Correlated Response Errors in a Panel Study of Voting

Little White Lies and Social Science Models: Correlated Response Errors in a Panel Study of Voting

WRc/Soil Survey inert suction sampler

As part of a survey of pesticides in the UK Major Aquifers, which WRc are undertaking on behalf of the National Rivers Authority, a site at Assarts Farm near Mansfield on the Sherwood Sandstone aquifer has been selected for the study of pesticide movement in the unsaturated zone of the sandstone aquifer. A difficulty in studying pesticide movement in the unsaturated zone is the need to obtain large volumes of water for analysis. WRc, in co-operation with the Soil Survey and Land Research Centre (SSLRC) has tackled this problem by using a modification of the SSLRC standard soil moisture suction sampler. The modified design (Fig. 1), manufactured by SSLRC, is intended to render the installation as chemically inert as possible, so the sampler shell is of stainless steel, tubes and caps of Teflon and the filter element ceramic. No adhesives or resins were used. At the design stage it was anticipated that each sampler would yield between about 100 ml and 500 ml depending on the soil moisture at the time of sampling. In order to be able to obtain the necessary volume of water (1.71 for three groups of pesticides) needed to analyse pesticides to the required detection limit, a total of twelve samplers in four clusters (Table 1) of three have been installed. It was intended that under optimum conditions each cluster of three samplers, when bulked, would provide sufficient water for one analysis. Under progressively drier conditions, the samples from the clusters may need to be bulked

Risk Perception1

Risk AnalysisVolume 11, Issue 1 p. 15-16 Risk Perception1 Aaron Wildavsky, Aaron Wildavsky University of California, Berkeley, Survey Research Center, Berkeley, California 94720.Search for more papers by this author Aaron Wildavsky, Aaron Wildavsky University of California, Berkeley, Survey Research Center, Berkeley, California 94720.Search for more papers by this author First published: March 1991 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1539-6924.1991.tb00559.xCitations: 6 1 Received October 9, 1990. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article.Citing Literature Volume11, Issue1March 1991Pages 15-16 RelatedInformation

Macropartisanship: An Empirical Reassessment

To evaluate the comparability of the Gallup and Michigan Survey Research Center measures for studying levels of partisanship among the U.S. electorate we compare the overtime distribution of partisanship and the correlates of partisanship using the results of Gallup surveys, the National Election Studies, and the General Social Surveys. Compared with the Gallup results, both the other two surveys reveal less short-term variation and also less total variation. Compared with the Gallup results, the National Election Studies partisanship results are less related to short-term electoral outcomes and do not appear to be strongly driven by short-term economic and political evaluations. Our analyses suggest that scholars should be cautious about using Gallup results to revise conclusions based upon analyses that employ the Michigan Survey Research Center party identification measure.

Strength of Religious Affiliation and Life Satisfaction

This study examines the impact of the strength of religious affiliation on attitudes toward life satisfaction. The data are taken from the 1984 NORC survey. All things considered, religious persons should be happier, more satisfied, and more fulfilled than the nonreligious. This general assertion is tested with respect to happiness, family satisfaction, health satisfaction, and life excitement. The predicted association holds generally for happiness, family satisfaction, and life excitement. These three associations are confirmed under several, but not all, of the control conditions. Health satisfaction, by contrast, appears to be independent of the strength of an individual's religious affiliation. This study, based on data from the 1984 National Opinion Research Center (NORC) survey, examines the impact of the stregnth of religious affiliation on attitudes toward life satisfaction. Moberg (1972) found that religious activity is positively related to life satisfaction and morale. Not only does society as a whole develop its own system of beliefs and values to serve as guides for action, but each individual also needs to find a system of values to serve as a guide for personal activity. All need some absolute values to live by (Yinger, 1963), and in turn these values offer answers to problems of both life and death. In a review of the role of religion, Roberts (1990) underscores its importance in providing meaning and understanding for the individual. If religion does offer meaning and understanding, it should enhance the individual's subjective sense of well-being. Given these assumptions, religious affiliation should have a demonstrable impact on perceived satisfaction with life. All things considered, religious persons should be happier, more satisfied, and more fulfilled than the nonreligious. The following relationships can be hypothesized regarding the impact of religious affiliation on human satisfaction in general, as measured by attitudes toward happiness, family satisfaction, health satisfaction, and life excitement.

Private Materialism, Personal Self-Fulfillment, Family Life, and Public Interest: The Nature, Effects, and Causes of Recent Changes in the Values of American Youth

Private Materialism, Personal Self-Fulfillment, Family Life, and Public Interest: The Nature, Effects, and Causes of Recent Changes in the Values of American Youth

Television News and the Informed Public: An Information-Processing Approach

Journal Article Television News and the Informed Public: An Information-Processing Approach Get access John P. Robinson, John P. Robinson Professor 1Sociology and Director of the Survey Research Center, University of Maryland Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Dennis K. Davis Dennis K. Davis Director 2School of Communication, University of North Dakota Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 40, Issue 3, September 1990, Pages 106–119, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1990.tb02273.x Published: 07 February 2006

BOOK REVIEWS

Book reviewed in this article:Climatological data for Agricultural Land Classification. The Met. Office, Soil Survey and Land Research Centre, MAFF (ADAS)London's hurricane by Mark Davison and Ian Currie, Eye on the hurricane by Bob Ogley and Kev ReynoldsKing Oak of Sevenoaks by Ron DenneyThe 1987 Storm: Impacts and responses. edited by A. J. Grayson

Can Changes in Context Reduce Vote Overreporting in Surveys?

This paper reports the results of two split-sample experiments designed to examine whether question context can reduce vote overreporting in surveys. The first experiment tests the effects of preceding the turnout item with a question about the location of the polling place. If respondents who overreport do not know where their polling place is, they should be less apt to report incorrectly about turnout after being asked the location of the poll. The second experiment tests the effects of preceding the vote item with a question about lifetime electoral behavior. If inaccuracy is due to respondents' wanting to present themselves in a favorable light, the opportunity to report past or usual good citizenship should reduce the pressure to claim participation in the last election. Much of the scholarly work on both electoral turnout and vote choice relies on self-reported behavior. In the typical election study, people are asked whether, and for whom, they voted. Yet many individuals do not report accurately about their political participation. In fact, one of the surest predictions in survey research is that more respondents will claim to have voted in postelection interviews than actually cast a ballot. Vote overreporting has been found in every major validation study. Record checks indicated that 13% of a sample of Denver residents falsely claimed to have voted in the 1948 presidential election (Parry and Crossley, 1950); 16% of a sample of New York City mothers receiving public assistance overreported their vote in the 1964 election (Weiss, 1968); and 12% of a nationwide sample of Americans inaccuSTANLEY PRESSER iS Professor of Sociology and Director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland. The author thanks Dana Ostrow and Tim Triplett for research assistance and Johnny Blair for helpful comments. This paper was presented at the 1990 annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research,

TRENDS IN AMERICANS' POLITICAL INFORMATION, 1967-1987

This study utilizes National Opinion Research Center (NORC) surveys in 1967, 1987, and 1988, and Survey Research Center/Center for Political Studies (SRC/CPS) data from 1960 to 1986 to explore trends in Americans' knowledge of public affairs. NORC and SRC/CPS data indicate that, despite being better educated, the public in the 1980s is slightly less informed than in the 1960s. The primary culprits for diminished political information are diminution in political interest and lessened reliance on newspapers.