Journal ArticleDOI
Public Opinion and Public Ignorance: The Fine Line Between Attitudes and Nonattitudes
Howard Schuman,Stanley Presser +1 more
TLDR
The majority of people asked their position on a highly obscure bill before Congress gave a "don't Know" response in two different national surveys, but between 25% and 30% offered an opinion.Abstract:
The majority of people asked their position on a highly obscure bill before Congress gave a "don't Know" (DK) response in two different national surveys, but between 25% and 30% offered an opinion. The latter figures dropped to 10% or less when the DK alternative was provided as part of the question. Contrary to findings concerning most issues, more educated persons showed greater willingness to admit ignorance in these cases involving an unknown object. For those persons who did express opinions, more than mere guessing seemed to be involved: respondents appeared to interpret the wording of the question in a way that had meaning for them, and then to express a more general attitude toward that constructed object.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Self-generated validity and other effects of measurement on belief, attitude, intention, and behavior.
Jack M. Feldman,John G. Lynch +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examined the effects of measurement operations on revealed correlations among survey measures of belief, attitude, intention, and behavior, and proposed a simple theory predicting that an earlier response will be used as a basis for another, subsequent response if the former is accessible and if it is perceived to be more diagnostic than other accessible inputs.
Book
Constructing Questions for Interviews and Questionnaires: Theory and Practice in Social Research
TL;DR: The open vs closed question debate: coding reponses to open questions and formulating sets of response options for closed questions as discussed by the authors has been studied in the context of question answering.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Nature and Origins of Misperceptions: Understanding False and Unsupported Beliefs About Politics
TL;DR: The authors argue that political misperceptions are typically rooted in directionally motivated reasoning, which limits the effectiveness of corrective information about controversial issues and political figures, and discuss factors known to affect the prevalence of directional motivated reasoning.
Book ChapterDOI
The Dunning-Kruger effect: On being ignorant of one's own ignorance.
TL;DR: In this article, the Dunning-Kruger effect is used to argue that the scope of people's ignorance is often invisible to them and that lack of expertise and knowledge often hides in the realm of unknown unknowns or is disguised by erroneous beliefs and background knowledge that only appear to be sufficient to conclude a right answer.
Journal ArticleDOI
Biotechnology and the European public
George Gaskell,Nick Allum,Martin W. Bauer,John Durant,Agnes Allansdottir,Heinz Bonfadelli,Daniel Boy,Suzanne de Cheveigné,Björn Fjæstad,Jan M. Gutteling,Juergen Hampel,Erling Jelsøe,Jorge Correia Jesuino,Matthias Kohring,Nicole Kronberger,Cees Midden,Torben Nielsen,Andrzej Przestalski,Timo Rusanen,George Sakellaris,Helge Torgersen,Tomasz Twardowski,Wolfgang Wagner +22 more
TL;DR: The latest European sample survey of public perceptions of biotechnology reveals widespread opposition to genetically modified (GM) food in much of Europe, but public attitudes to medical and environmental applications remain positive.
References
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Book
The art of asking questions
TL;DR: The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Analysis of Multidimensional Contingency Tables: Stepwise Procedures and Direct Estimation Methods for Building Models for Multiple Classifications
TL;DR: For the m-way contingency table, the authors consider models that describe the possible multiplicative interactions among the m variables of the table and show how to select models that fit the data in the table, using methods that are, in part, somewhat analogous to the usual stepwise procedures in regression analysis.
Journal ArticleDOI
Predicting No Opinion in the Polls
TL;DR: Converse et al. as discussed by the authors found that the educational level of respondents is the single best predictor of expressed public ignorance or indifference, which can be explained in some part by certain properties of the questions pollsters ask and points to some unique characteristics of each.