Patrick Sturgis
Biographic Data
| ID | 224682 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Patrick Sturgis |
| GIVEN NAMES | Patrick |
| FAMILY NAME | Sturgis |
| SIGNATURE | STURGIS P |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Southampton |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1180-3493 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 46 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 736 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
Survey Experience and Nonresponse in an Online Probability Panel: A Survival Analysis
We fit discrete-time survival models to data from an online probability panel (OPP), where the outcome is the respondent’s first nonresponse to a survey invitation, following at least one previous survey completion. This approach has the advantage of utilizing information about survey experiences over multiple survey waves, while accommodating the unbalanced data structure typical of OPPs, where the number, timing, and content of survey invitatio…
AI labeling reduces the perceived accuracy of online content but has limited broader effects
Explicit labeling of online content produced by artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely discussed policy for ensuring transparency and promoting public confidence. Yet little is known about the scope of AI labeling effects on public assessments of labeled content. We contribute new evidence on this question from a survey experiment using a high-quality nationally representative probability sample ( n = 3861). First, we demonstrate that explicit …
SOCbot: Using Large Language Models to Dynamically Measure and Classify Occupations in Surveys
We present the results of a new approach to measuring the occupations of respondents in surveys using Large Language Models (LLMs). In our new approach, which we call SOCbot, an LLM integrated in the questionnaire scripting software is used to code the job title to the occupational classification in real-time during the interview. Where the job title does not contain sufficient information to be coded with confidence, the LLM probes for further r…
Ethnic differences in intergenerational housing mobility in England and Wales
Home ownership is the largest component of wealth for most households and its intergenerational transmission underpins the production and reproduction of economic inequalities across generations. Yet, little is currently known about ethnic differences in the intergenerational transmission of housing tenure. In this paper, we use linked Census data covering 1971-2011 to document rates of intergenerational housing tenure mobility across ethnic grou…
Uncovering Digital Trace Data Biases: Tracking Undercoverage in Web Tracking Data
Digital trace data is an increasingly popular alternative to surveys, often considered as the gold standard. This study critically assesses the use of web tracking data to study online media exposure. Specifically, we focus on a critical error source of this type of data, tracking undercoverage: researchers’ failure to capture data from all the devices and browsers that individuals utilize to go online. Using data from Spain, Portugal, and Italy,…
Does Local Area Social Mobility Affect Political Alienation
While existing research has considered how individual-level social mobility experiences affect a person’s political outlook, less attention has been paid to how historic levels of social mobility in local areas influence political attitudes and political behaviour. We link individual-level data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study to small area estimates of social class mobility derived from the decennial census. We find that living in a low …
Inequalities in late adolescents’ educational experiences and wellbeing during the Covid-19 pandemic
While the health risks of Covid-19 for young people are low, they have borne a heavy cost of the pandemic through intense disruption to their education and social lives. These effects have not been experienced equally across social and demographic groups. Using data from a nationally representative survey of 4,000 young people in England linked to their education records, we study inequalities in late adolescents' experiences of the Covid-19 pand…
Personality and Survey Satisficing
In this paper, we consider the role of personality as a component of motivation in promoting or inhibiting the tendency to exhibit the satisficing response styles of midpoint, straightlining, and Don’t Know responding. We assess whether respondents who are low on the Conscientiousness and Agreeableness dimensions of the Big Five Personality Inventory are more likely to exhibit these satisficing response styles. We find large effects of these pers…
Police Legitimacy and the Norm to Cooperate: Using a Mixed Effects Location-Scale Model to Estimate the Strength of Social Norms at a Small Spatial Scale
Spatial and social mobility in England and Wales: A sub-national analysis of differences and trends over time
Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. We bring these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post-war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. Our findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over tim…
Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence
The demise of the survey? A research note on trends in the use of survey data in the social sciences, 1939 to 2015
We assess the case for a decline in the use of survey data in the social sciences during a period in which conventional survey research has faced existential challenges to its ongoing feasibility and growing competition from new forms of ‘Big Data’. Presser (1983) and Converse (1987) undertook content analysis of articles published in a set of leading social science journals, finding a trend of increasing the use of survey data between 1939 and 1…
Was there a 'Youthquake' in the 2017 general election
Studies using data from the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes survey have concluded that the case for a significant rise in turnout amongst young people at the 2017 general election remains unproven. A limitation of these data sets for assessing the so-called Youthquake thesis is the small number of younger voters they contain. In this research note we use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey to produce more robust…
How Collective Is Collective Efficacy? The Importance of Consensus in Judgments About Community Cohesion and Willingness to Intervene
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborho…
Declining social mobility? Evidence from five linked censuses in England and Wales 1971-2011
In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter-generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS-LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and l…
Comment on ‘What to do instead of significance testing? Calculating the “number of counterfactual cases needed to disturb a finding”’ by Stephen Gorard and Jonathan Gorard
This article refers to:What to do instead of significance testing? Calculating the ‘number of counterfactual cases needed to disturb a finding’This article is related to:Explaining the number of counterfactual cases needed to disturb a finding: a reply to Kuha and Sturgis
Fieldwork Effort, Response Rate, and the Distribution of Survey Outcomes
This study assesses how survey outcome distributions change over repeated calls made to addresses in face-to-face household interview surveys. We consider this question for 541 survey variables, drawn from six major face-to-face UK surveys that have different sample designs, cover different topic areas, and achieve response rates between 54 and 76 percent. Using a multilevel meta-analytic framework, we estimate for each survey variable the expect…
Places and Preferences: A Longitudinal Analysis of Self-Selection and Contextual Effects
Contextual theories of political behaviour assert that the contexts in which people live influence their political beliefs and vote choices. Most studies, however, fail to distinguish contextual influence from self-selection of individuals into areas. This article advances understanding of this controversy by tracking the left–right position and party identification of thousands of individuals over an eighteen-year period in England before and af…
Handbook of Research Methods and Applications in Social Capital
Social capital is fundamentally concerned with resources in social relations. This Handbook brings together leading scholars from around the world to address important questions on the determinants, manifestations and consequences of social capital. Combining cutting-edge theory and appropriate data and methods, it presents a challenge to both social capital researchers interested in explaining social inequality and to policy-makers with responsi…
Increasing inter-generational social mobility: Is Educational Expansion the Answer
Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to…
On the limits of public engagement for the governance of emerging technologies
Religious beliefs, knowledge about science and attitudes towards medical genetics
The use of genetics in medical research is one of the most important avenues currently being explored to enhance human health. For some, the idea that we can intervene in the mechanisms of human existence at such a fundamental level can be at minimum worrying and at most repugnant. In particular, religious doctrines are likely to collide with the rapidly advancing capability for science to make such interventions. The key ingredient for acceptanc…
Improving Survey Methods: Lessons from Recent Research
Invited talks were given by Jelke Bethlehem (Statistics Netherlands), Don Dillman (Washington State University), and Peter Lynn (University of Essex). The second conference entitled “Advancing Survey Methods” was held two years later in
Middle Alternatives Revisited: How the neither/nor Response Acts as a Way of Saying “I Don’t Know
A persistent problem in the design of bipolar attitude questions is whether or not to include a middle response alternative. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that people might hold opinions which are 'neutral' with regard to issues of public controversy. On the other, question designers suspect that offering a mid-point may attract respondents with no opinion, or those who lean to one side of an issue but do not wish to incur the cogni…
Ethnic diversity, segregation and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London
The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood …
Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered
We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on …
Do Neighborhoods Generate Fear of Crime? An Empirical Test Using the British Crime Survey
For a long time, criminologists have contended that neighborhoods are important determinants of how individuals perceive their risk of criminal victimization. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and policy relevance of these claims, the empirical evidence base is surprisingly thin and inconsistent. Drawing on data from a national probability sample of individuals, linked to independent measures of neighborhood demographic characteristics, vis…
Ethnic diversity, segregation and the social cohesion of neighbourhoods in London
The question of whether and how ethnic diversity affects the social cohesion of communities has become an increasingly prominent and contested topic of academic and political debate. In this paper we focus on a single city: London. As possibly the most ethnically diverse conurbation on the planet, London serves as a particularly suitable test-bed for theories about the effects of ethnic heterogeneity on prosocial attitudes. We find neighbourhood …
Assessing the Validity of Generalized Trust Questions: What Kind of Trust are we Measuring
In the social capital literature a distinction is made between trust expressed in people in general, and trust in people who are known to us personally. In this article we investigate the frames of reference respondents make use of when answering two commonly used interpersonal trust questions. Half of our sample was administered a version which asks respondents whether “most people” can be trusted. The other half of the sample was administered a…
Places and Preferences: A Longitudinal Analysis of Self-Selection and Contextual Effects
Contextual theories of political behaviour assert that the contexts in which people live influence their political beliefs and vote choices. Most studies, however, fail to distinguish contextual influence from self-selection of individuals into areas. This article advances understanding of this controversy by tracking the left–right position and party identification of thousands of individuals over an eighteen-year period in England before and af…
A Genetic Basis for Social Trust
An Experiment on the Measurement of Political Knowledge in Surveys
In a series of articles, Mondak and colleagues argue that the conventional way of measuring political knowledge in surveys is flawed. Personality related "propensity to guess" underestimates the level of political knowledge in the population and distorts estimates of between group differences, when a DK alternative is offered. This has led Mondak to recommend the use of closed-ended items on which DKs are not explicitly offered, following best pr…
Middle Alternatives Revisited: How the neither/nor Response Acts as a Way of Saying “I Don’t Know
A persistent problem in the design of bipolar attitude questions is whether or not to include a middle response alternative. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that people might hold opinions which are 'neutral' with regard to issues of public controversy. On the other, question designers suspect that offering a mid-point may attract respondents with no opinion, or those who lean to one side of an issue but do not wish to incur the cogni…
Fictitious Issues Revisited: Political Interest, Knowledge and the Generation of Nonattitudes
It has long been suspected that, when asked to provide opinions on matters of public policy, significant numbers of those surveyed do so with only the vaguest understanding of the issues in question. In this article, we present the results of a study which demonstrates that a significant minority of the British public are, in fact, willing to provide evaluations of non-existent policy issues. In contrast to previous American research, which has f…
A Different Take on the Deliberative Poll: Information, Deliberation, and Attitude Constraint
Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theorists have long been concerned with the normative and methodological implications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the proposed remedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses proffered by an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the most ambitious to date has been Fishkin's concept of the deliberative poll (Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1997). Combining probability sampling with i…
Declining social mobility? Evidence from five linked censuses in England and Wales 1971-2011
In this paper we add to the existing evidence base on recent trends in inter-generational social mobility in England and Wales. We analyse data from the Office for National Statistics Longitudinal Study (ONS-LS), which links individual records from the five decennial censuses between 1971 and 2011. The ONS-LS is an excellent data resource for the study of social mobility because it has a very large sample size, excellent population coverage and l…
Spatial and social mobility in England and Wales: A sub-national analysis of differences and trends over time
Recent studies of social mobility have documented that not only who your parents are, but also where you grow up, substantially influences subsequent life chances. We bring these two concepts together to study social mobility in England and Wales, in three post-war generations, using linked Decennial Census data. Our findings show considerable spatial variation in rates of absolute and relative mobility, as well as how these have changed over tim…
Trust in science, social consensus and vaccine confidence
How Collective Is Collective Efficacy? The Importance of Consensus in Judgments About Community Cohesion and Willingness to Intervene
Existing studies have generally measured collective efficacy by combining survey respondents’ ratings of their local area into an overall summary for each neighborhood. Naturally, this approach results in a substantive focus on the variation in average levels of collective efficacy between neighborhoods. In this article, we focus on the variation in consensus of collective efficacy judgments. To account for differential consensus among neighborho…
Increasing inter-generational social mobility: Is Educational Expansion the Answer
Reforms which increase the stock of education in a society have long been held by policy-makers as key to improving rates of intergenerational social mobility. Yet, despite the intuitive plausibility of this idea, the empirical evidence in support of an effect of educational expansion on social fluidity is both indirect and weak. In this paper we use the raising of the minimum school leaving age from 15 to 16 years in England and Wales in 1972 to…
Public Confidence in the Police: A Time-Series Analysis
Empirical analyses of the causes of public confidence in policing have been based almost entirely on cross-sectional survey data, with a consequent focus on between-group differences in levels of confidence at a single point in time. Our aim here is to introduce a time dimension to this area of investigation. Employing repeated cross-sectional survey data from the British Crime Survey, we apply time-series regression methods to show how confidenc…
Taking Political Engagement Online: An Experimental Analysis of Asynchronous Discussion Forums
In this study we analyse the effect of participation in an online asynchronous discussion forum on the direction and magnitude of opinion change and policy preferences relating to youth antisocial behaviour among a large sample of online panel members. Panel members were randomly assigned to conditions that manipulated: (1) the amount of information about youth antisocial behaviour provided; and (2) the extent to which panel members were able to …
Was there a 'Youthquake' in the 2017 general election
Studies using data from the British Election Study and the British Social Attitudes survey have concluded that the case for a significant rise in turnout amongst young people at the 2017 general election remains unproven. A limitation of these data sets for assessing the so-called Youthquake thesis is the small number of younger voters they contain. In this research note we use data from the UK Household Longitudinal Survey to produce more robust…
Knowledge and Collective Preferences: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Estimating the Opinions of a Better Informed Public
This article compares estimates of 'informed' public opinion derived from the regression-based approach of Bartels, Delli Carpini and Keeter, and Althaus with those from the deliberative polling method of Fishkin on the same sample of respondents. Contrary to low-information rationality perspectives, both methods indicate that across a range of prominent policy domains, level of political awareness has a strong impact on the expressed preferences…
The demise of the survey? A research note on trends in the use of survey data in the social sciences, 1939 to 2015
We assess the case for a decline in the use of survey data in the social sciences during a period in which conventional survey research has faced existential challenges to its ongoing feasibility and growing competition from new forms of ‘Big Data’. Presser (1983) and Converse (1987) undertook content analysis of articles published in a set of leading social science journals, finding a trend of increasing the use of survey data between 1939 and 1…
Fieldwork Effort, Response Rate, and the Distribution of Survey Outcomes
This study assesses how survey outcome distributions change over repeated calls made to addresses in face-to-face household interview surveys. We consider this question for 541 survey variables, drawn from six major face-to-face UK surveys that have different sample designs, cover different topic areas, and achieve response rates between 54 and 76 percent. Using a multilevel meta-analytic framework, we estimate for each survey variable the expect…
Uncovering Digital Trace Data Biases: Tracking Undercoverage in Web Tracking Data
Digital trace data is an increasingly popular alternative to surveys, often considered as the gold standard. This study critically assesses the use of web tracking data to study online media exposure. Specifically, we focus on a critical error source of this type of data, tracking undercoverage: researchers’ failure to capture data from all the devices and browsers that individuals utilize to go online. Using data from Spain, Portugal, and Italy,…
Is Success in Obtaining Contact and Cooperation Correlated With the Magnitude of Interviewer Variance
Evidence is now beginning to accumulate that shows that interviewer attitudes, personality, and behavior are predictive of success in achieving contact and cooperation with sampled households. A less frequently explored possibility, however, is that these same characteristics might also be the source of variability in the extent to which interviewers follow best practices in the implementation of standardized interviewing. That is to say, there m…
Measuring the Returns to Networking and the Accumulation of Social Capital: Any Evidence of Bonding, Bridging, or Linking
This article presents analyses of individual investment in social capital using both the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Time Use Survey (2000) (UKTUS). We suggest a general theoretical framework that could possibly explain individual investment in various forms of social networking. Measures of social capital are then constructed in an attempt to capture the extent of individual investment in bonding, bridging, and linking netwo…
Attitudes and Measurement Error Revisited: A Reply to Johnston and Pattie
In a recent Note in this Journal, Johnston and PattieR. J. Johnston and Charles Pattie, 'Inconsistent Individual Attitudes within Consistent Attitudinal Structures: Comments on an Important Issue Raised by John Bartle's Paper on Causal Modelling of Voting in Britain', British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 361–74. contend that they have discovered an ecological fallacy in the behaviour of the six-item scaleJohnston and Pattie's analysis…
Attitudes and Measurement Error Revisited: A Reply to Johnston and Pattie
In a recent Note in this Journal, Johnston and PattieR. J. Johnston and Charles Pattie, 'Inconsistent Individual Attitudes within Consistent Attitudinal Structures: Comments on an Important Issue Raised by John Bartle's Paper on Causal Modelling of Voting in Britain', British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 361–74. contend that they have discovered an ecological fallacy in the behaviour of the six-item scaleJohnston and Pattie's analysis…
Knowledge and Collective Preferences: A Comparison of Two Approaches to Estimating the Opinions of a Better Informed Public
This article compares estimates of 'informed' public opinion derived from the regression-based approach of Bartels, Delli Carpini and Keeter, and Althaus with those from the deliberative polling method of Fishkin on the same sample of respondents. Contrary to low-information rationality perspectives, both methods indicate that across a range of prominent policy domains, level of political awareness has a strong impact on the expressed preferences…
Science in Society: Re-Evaluating the Deficit Model of Public Attitudes
The “deficit model” of public attitudes towards science has led to controversy over the role of scientific knowledge in explaining lay people’s attitudes towards science. In this paper we challenge the de facto orthodoxy that has connected the deficit model and contextualist perspectives with quantitative and qualitative research methods respectively. We simultaneously test hypotheses from both theoretical approaches using quantitative methodolog…
Attitudes to biotechnology: Estimating the opinions of a better-informed public
Public familiarity with basic scientific concepts and principles has been proposed as essential for effective democratic decision-making (Miller, 1998). Empirical research, however, finds that public 'scientific literacy' is generally low, falling well short of what normative criteria would consider 'acceptable.' This has prompted calls to better engage, educate and inform the public on scientific matters, with the additional, usually implicit as…
A Different Take on the Deliberative Poll: Information, Deliberation, and Attitude Constraint
Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theorists have long been concerned with the normative and methodological implications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the proposed remedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses proffered by an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the most ambitious to date has been Fishkin's concept of the deliberative poll (Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1997). Combining probability sampling with i…
Investigating the factors influencing professional identity of first‐year health and social care students
Interprofessional education (IPE) involves students from different professions being brought together to learn about each other's profession. Several models of IPE exist, and central to the debate around which of these models is the most appropriate is the question of the stage of training in which to implement these programmes. Currently, however, there is no consensus on this question. Debate so far has revolved around the strength of professio…
Science knowledge and attitudes across cultures: A meta-analysis
The correlation between knowledge and attitudes has been the source of controversy in research on the public understanding of science (PUS). Although many studies, both quantitative and qualitative, have examined this issue, the results are at best diverse and at worst contradictory. In this paper, we review the evidence on the relationship between public attitudes and public knowledge about science across 40 countries using a meta-analytic appro…
An Experiment on the Measurement of Political Knowledge in Surveys
In a series of articles, Mondak and colleagues argue that the conventional way of measuring political knowledge in surveys is flawed. Personality related "propensity to guess" underestimates the level of political knowledge in the population and distorts estimates of between group differences, when a DK alternative is offered. This has led Mondak to recommend the use of closed-ended items on which DKs are not explicitly offered, following best pr…
Measuring the Returns to Networking and the Accumulation of Social Capital: Any Evidence of Bonding, Bridging, or Linking
This article presents analyses of individual investment in social capital using both the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) and the UK Time Use Survey (2000) (UKTUS). We suggest a general theoretical framework that could possibly explain individual investment in various forms of social networking. Measures of social capital are then constructed in an attempt to capture the extent of individual investment in bonding, bridging, and linking netwo…
Secondary Analysis of Survey Data
This chapter discusses the practical issues and considerations that students need to take into account when selecting and analysing data from existing survey datasets. A discussion of what is meant by ‘secondary’ analysis, and why one might want to undertake such analysis, is followed by a summary of the major types of survey dataset that are available. Differences between panel, cross-sectional and continuous surveys are highlighted and examples…
Public attitudes to genomic science: An experiment in information provision
We use an experimental panel study design to investigate the effect of providing “value-neutral” information about genomic science in the form of a short film to a random sample of the British public. We find little evidence of attitude change as a function of information provision. However, our results show that information provision significantly increased dropout from the study amongst less educated respondents. Our findings have implications …
Assessing the Validity of Generalized Trust Questions: What Kind of Trust are we Measuring
In the social capital literature a distinction is made between trust expressed in people in general, and trust in people who are known to us personally. In this article we investigate the frames of reference respondents make use of when answering two commonly used interpersonal trust questions. Half of our sample was administered a version which asks respondents whether “most people” can be trusted. The other half of the sample was administered a…
Fictitious Issues Revisited: Political Interest, Knowledge and the Generation of Nonattitudes
It has long been suspected that, when asked to provide opinions on matters of public policy, significant numbers of those surveyed do so with only the vaguest understanding of the issues in question. In this article, we present the results of a study which demonstrates that a significant minority of the British public are, in fact, willing to provide evaluations of non-existent policy issues. In contrast to previous American research, which has f…
A Genetic Basis for Social Trust
Do Neighborhoods Generate Fear of Crime? An Empirical Test Using the British Crime Survey
For a long time, criminologists have contended that neighborhoods are important determinants of how individuals perceive their risk of criminal victimization. Yet, despite the theoretical importance and policy relevance of these claims, the empirical evidence base is surprisingly thin and inconsistent. Drawing on data from a national probability sample of individuals, linked to independent measures of neighborhood demographic characteristics, vis…
Does Ethnic Diversity Erode Trust? Putnam’s ‘Hunkering Down’ Thesis Reconsidered
We use a multi-level modelling approach to estimate the effect of ethnic diversity on measures of generalized and strategic trust using data from a new survey in Britain with a sample size approaching 25,000 individuals. In addition to the ethnic diversity of neighbourhoods, we incorporate a range of indicators of the socio-economic characteristics of individuals and the areas in which they live. Our results show no effect of ethnic diversity on …
Public Confidence in the Police: A Time-Series Analysis
Empirical analyses of the causes of public confidence in policing have been based almost entirely on cross-sectional survey data, with a consequent focus on between-group differences in levels of confidence at a single point in time. Our aim here is to introduce a time dimension to this area of investigation. Employing repeated cross-sectional survey data from the British Crime Survey, we apply time-series regression methods to show how confidenc…
Is Success in Obtaining Contact and Cooperation Correlated With the Magnitude of Interviewer Variance
Evidence is now beginning to accumulate that shows that interviewer attitudes, personality, and behavior are predictive of success in achieving contact and cooperation with sampled households. A less frequently explored possibility, however, is that these same characteristics might also be the source of variability in the extent to which interviewers follow best practices in the implementation of standardized interviewing. That is to say, there m…
Taking Political Engagement Online: An Experimental Analysis of Asynchronous Discussion Forums
In this study we analyse the effect of participation in an online asynchronous discussion forum on the direction and magnitude of opinion change and policy preferences relating to youth antisocial behaviour among a large sample of online panel members. Panel members were randomly assigned to conditions that manipulated: (1) the amount of information about youth antisocial behaviour provided; and (2) the extent to which panel members were able to …
Exploring public discourses about emerging technologies through statistical clustering of open-ended survey questions
The primary method by which social scientists describe public opinion about science and technology is to present frequencies from fixed response survey questions and to use multivariate statistical models to predict where different groups stand with regard to perceptions of risk and benefit. Such an approach requires measures of individual preference which can be aligned numerically in an ordinal or, preferably, a continuous manner along an under…
Understanding support for complementary and alternative medicine in general populations: Use and perceived efficacy
Proponents of complementary and alternative medicine argue that these treatments can be used with great effect in addition to, and sometimes instead of, conventional medicine, a position which has drawn sustained opposition from those who advocate an evidence-based approach to the evaluation of treatment efficacy. Using recent survey data from the United Kingdom, this article seeks to establish a clearer understanding of the nature of the public'…
On the limits of public engagement for the governance of emerging technologies
Religious beliefs, knowledge about science and attitudes towards medical genetics
The use of genetics in medical research is one of the most important avenues currently being explored to enhance human health. For some, the idea that we can intervene in the mechanisms of human existence at such a fundamental level can be at minimum worrying and at most repugnant. In particular, religious doctrines are likely to collide with the rapidly advancing capability for science to make such interventions. The key ingredient for acceptanc…
Improving Survey Methods: Lessons from Recent Research
Invited talks were given by Jelke Bethlehem (Statistics Netherlands), Don Dillman (Washington State University), and Peter Lynn (University of Essex). The second conference entitled “Advancing Survey Methods” was held two years later in
Middle Alternatives Revisited: How the neither/nor Response Acts as a Way of Saying “I Don’t Know
A persistent problem in the design of bipolar attitude questions is whether or not to include a middle response alternative. On the one hand, it is reasonable to assume that people might hold opinions which are 'neutral' with regard to issues of public controversy. On the other, question designers suspect that offering a mid-point may attract respondents with no opinion, or those who lean to one side of an issue but do not wish to incur the cogni…
Psychology (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Political science (27 works) · Economics (18 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Social Psychology (16 works) · Politics (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Social science (13 works) · Electoral Systems and Political Participation (10 works)