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| Chapter 6: Public Opinion |
| Get Involved |
| Public opinion polls are some of the most widely available resources on Internet. Collections of public opinion surveys are everywhere, often with detailed analysis by experts. The Internet is also increasingly used as a platform for partially collecting and measuring the moods of the American public. There are many ways you can now use the Web to personally take an online survey, either to register your opinions or to learn how you compare to the public at large. |
| 1. Begin your online research into public opinion by familiarizing yourself with some of the largest, most established polling operations:
The Gallup polling firm has made many of its surveys available for free online. The Pew Center for the People and Press makes its high-quality surveys accessible to the general public. Some other prominent polling operations include Rasmussen Reports and Survey USA Visit the above websites and select a topic of interest to you. Then try and learn more about it from each of these websites. a. Which topic did you choose? |
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| 1b. What do Americans seem to say about this topic? Summarize the poll numbers. |
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| 2. It is key, when interpreting any public opinion poll, to remember that many Americans begin with low basic levels of knowledge about the questions they are being asked.
Test your own level of political knowledge against that of the public at the Pew News IQ survey, located at: http://pewresearch.org/newsiq/ a. What questions regarding current events were you asked |
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| 2b. Describe your answers. How did you score? |
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| You can compare your knowledge versus how a broad sample of Americans handled these same questions. |
| 3. The Web is not merely a means of viewing public opinion. It is also a new means for collecting and studying it. For one example of web-based survey research, explore the features of Harvard University’s Project Implicit. This project measures how Americans think and feel about different topics, asking them to participate in online surveys.
Choose one of Project Implicit’s demonstration projects, to get a feel for how public opinion is studied in the twenty-first century: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/selectatest.html a. Which project did you choose? What were some of the questions you were asked by Project Implicit? What are some of Project Implicit’s current findings for that project? |
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| 3b. How do you think the Web could be used to study public opinion in the future? |
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