Public Misunderstanding of Political Facts: How Question Wording Affected Estimates of Partisan Differences in Birtherism
Public Misunderstanding of Political Facts: How Question Wording Affected Estimates of Partisan Differences in Birtherism
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公众对政治事实的误解：问题措辞如何影响对生育主义党派差异的估计
DOI：
10.1093/poq/nft080
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发表时间：
2014
影响因子：
3.4
通讯作者：
Urja Mittal
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
J. Krosnick;Neil Malhotra;Urja Mittal
在2010年和2011年，引人注目的全国调查记录了公众，特别是共和党人，经常不承认巴拉克奥巴马出生在美国。然而，不同的问题产生了截然不同的结果。哥伦比亚广播公司（CBS）和《纽约时报》（New York Times）的一个封闭式问题引发了最高的党派分歧，其中包括可能具有引导性的介绍性句子。在明显的错误信息中，最小的党派分歧来自ABC新闻/华盛顿邮报的一个开放式问题，该问题没有提出后续问题，而后续问题是衡量公众对奥巴马是否出生在美国的看法所必需的。本文回顾了出生论的民意调查，并描述了一个实验嵌入在一个具有全国代表性的抽样调查测试是否这两个问题的方法特征可能会扭曲他们的结果，并导致他们之间的明显差异。一个封闭式问题的版本，包括领先的介绍性句子产生了更大程度的明显的党派分歧比一个版本的问题没有介绍性句子。在公开问题之后，另一个问题澄清了人们的信仰（询问在巴拉克奥巴马出生时夏威夷是否是美国的一部分）并没有改变该项目所支持的关于公众理解准确性的结论。因此，这项研究说明了不同的问题措辞如何导致不同的民意调查产生显着不同的结果，并提供了一个警告使用潜在的主导措辞。
In 2010 and 2011, highly visible national surveys documented frequent failure among the public, especially among Republicans, to acknowledge that Barack Obama was born in the United States. However, different questions yielded strikingly different results. The highest rate of partisan division was generated by a CBS/New York Times closed-ended question that included potentially leading introductory sentences. The smallest partisan gap in apparent misinformation was generated by an ABC News/Washington Post open-ended question that did not ask a follow-up that was needed to gauge public beliefs about whether Mr. Obama was born in the United States. This paper reviews the polls on birtherism and describes an experiment embedded in a nationally representative sample survey testing whether methodological features of these two questions might have distorted their results and caused the apparent discrepancy between them. A version of the closed-ended question including the leading introductory sentences yielded a much larger degree of apparent partisan division than did a version of the question without the introductory sentences. Following the open question with another question that clarified people�s beliefs (asking about whether Hawaii was part of the United States at the time of Barack Obama�s birth) did not alter the conclusions supported by that item about the accuracy of public understanding. This study therefore illustrates how different question wording caused different polls to produce notably different results and provides a caution about the use of potentially leading wording.