Dependent Preferences and Over-Time Instability in Survey Responses

当人们被问及对重大政治问题的看法时，他们在不同的时间经常给出不同的答案。这种公众倾向于提供不稳定的调查结果，导致许多民意研究人员得出结论，“大部分选民根本没有有意义的信念，即使是在很长一段时间内形成精英之间激烈政治争议的问题上”，这一结论的范围超出了民意调查，市场研究和选举调查。如果这么多人对问题知之甚少，民主政府的基础就会受到质疑。由于目前的调查无法捕捉人们偏好的复杂性，调查答复可能会随着时间的推移而不稳定。研究人员在一系列有限的调查中发现，许多人对一系列政策问题有依赖性偏好。当一个人对一个问题的偏好取决于其他问题的结果时，他就有了依赖性偏好。然而，大多数民意研究都假设人们有独立的偏好，或者他们对一个问题的偏好与其他问题的结果无关。研究人员建议对1200名成年美国公民进行全国性的三波小组调查。该调查包括新的问题来检测依赖性偏好，揭示人们在不同问题上看到的联系。研究人员假设，在第一波调查中具有依赖偏好的受访者最有可能随着时间的推移改变他们的调查回答，因为他们对不断变化的世界做出了反应。2004年11月全国选举之前将进行两次调查，之后将进行一次调查。调查数据将揭示哪些人有依赖性偏好，以及对哪些问题有依赖性偏好。调查员还致力于新的统计模型，将调查答复的变化分类为随机或系统性。正如研究人员在以前的研究中所表明的那样，不稳定的调查结果可能是由于受访者之间的依赖性偏好。即使依赖偏好是合理的、良好的和稳定的，它们也可能迫使人们表现出非理性的、病态的和不稳定的调查反应。第三，揭示依赖性偏好为调查研究人员提供了一系列新的问题。谁有依赖偏好，为什么？如果这项提案得到资助，所收集的数据将沿着向公众和科学界提供，同时提供的数据还包括受访者的人口特征、信息水平、对政治和媒体的关注、政治倾向以及在总统选举中的投票意向和投票选择。这些数据可能会提供答案的许多困惑，在文献中的投票行为，公众舆论和选举活动。

People frequently give different answers at different times when asked their opinions on important political issues. This tendency of the public to offer unstable survey responses has led many public opinion researchers to conclude that "Large portions of an electorate simply do not have meaningful beliefs, even on issues that have formed the basis for intense political controversy among elites for substantial periods of time" The reach of this conclusion extends beyond public opinion polls, market research, and election surveys. If so many people know so little about issues, the very foundations of democratic government are called into question. Survey responses may be unstable over time due to an inability of surveys as currently constructed to capture the complexity of people's preferences. The investigator has found in a set of limited surveys that many people have dependent preferences on a host of policy issues. A person has dependent preferences when her preference on one issue depends on the outcome of other issues. Yet most of the research in public opinion assumes that people have independent preferences, or that their preference on one issue is not linked to the outcome of other issues. The researcher proposes a national, three-wave panel survey of 1200 adult US citizens. The survey includes new questions to detect dependent preferences, revealing the connections that people see across issues. The investigator hypothesizes that respondents who have dependent preferences in the first wave of the survey will be the most likely to change their survey responses over-time as they react to a changing world. Two survey waves will occur before the November 2004 national elections; one survey wave, after. The survey data will reveal which people have dependent preferences, and for which issues. The investigator also works on new statistical models to classify changes in survey responses as random or systematic. As the researcher has shown in previous research, unstable survey responses may be due to dependent preferences among respondents. Even if dependent preferences are reasonable, well-formed, and stable, they may compel people to exhibit survey responses that appear irrational, ill-formed, and unstable. Third, uncovering dependent preferences opens a new set of questions for survey researchers to explore. Who has dependent preferences, and why? If this proposal is funded, the data gathered will be available to the general public and scientific community, along with data on respondents' demographic characteristics, information levels, attention to politics and the media, political predispositions, and vote intention and vote choice in a presidential election. These data may provide answers to many puzzles in the literature on voting behavior, public opinion, and election campaigns.