Penny S. Visser

Attitudes in the social context: the impact of social network composition on individual-level attitude strength.

Four studies, using both experimental and correlational designs, explored the implications of being embedded within attitudinally congruent versus attitudinally heterogeneous social networks for individual-level attitude strength. Individuals embedded within congruent social networks (i.e., made up of others with similar views) were more resistant to attitude change than were individuals embedded within heterogeneous social networks (i.e., made up of others with a range of views). Mediational evidence suggests that attitudinally congruous social networks may increase attitude strength by decreasing attitudinal ambivalence and perhaps by increasing the certainty with which people hold their attitudes. These results suggest that features of the social context in which an attitude is held have important implications for individual-level attitude strength.

MAIL SURVEYS FOR ELECTION FORECASTING? AN EVALUATION OF THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH POLL

Because of slow turnaround time and typically low response rates, mail surveys have generally been considered of little value in election forecasting. However, statewide mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper since 1980 have made remarkably accurate forecasts of Ohio election outcomes. In comparison to statewide surveys by two other organizations employing conventional telephone interview methods, the mail surveys were consistently more accurate and were generally less susceptible to sources of inaccuracy such as high rolloff and low publicity. The mail surveys advantage is attributable at least in part to larger sample sizes, sampling and response procedures that yielded more representative samples of voters, lack of the need to allocate undecided respondents, and superior questionnaire design. These findings suggest that mail surveys not only may be viable alternatives to telephone surveys but may actually be superior to them under some conditions. FurtherPENNY S. VISSER is a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Ohio State University and JON A. KROSNICK is an associate professor in the departments of psychology and political science at Ohio State University. JESSE MARQUETTE iS a professor of political science and director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Akron. MICHAEL CURTIN iS the editor of the Columbus Dispatch. This research was supported by grant SBR-9503822 from the National Science Foundation to Jon A. Krosnick and by grant T32-MH19728-03 from the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided a predoctoral fellowship to Penny S. Visser. We thank Andy Smith and Al Tuchfarber from the University of Cincinnati for providing information on their preelection surveys, and Jim Hunter from the Columbus Dispatch for archival assistance. We also thank Richard Carson, Robert Cameron Mitchell, and Stanley Presser for helpful comments on an earlier draft. Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Penny S. Visser or Jon A. Krosnick, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (E-mail visser.104@osu.edu or krosnick@osu.edu). Public Opinion Quarterly Volume 60:181-227 ? 1996 by the American Association for Public Opinion Research All rights reserved. 0033-362X/96/6002-0015

Reexamining the circumplex model of affect.

02.50 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.174 on Wed, 31 May 2017 18:33:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 182 Visser, Krosnick, Marquette, and Curtin more, these results demonstrate that surveys with low response rates are not necessarily low in validity. Since their inauspicious beginnings over 150 years ago (Smith 1990), preelection forecasting surveys have undergone tremendous refinement (Field 1983; Frankovic 1992; Gallup 1972; Mann and Orren 1992; Perry 1960, 1979; Rosenstone 1983). Early surveys, such as the straw polls of the Literary Digest magazine, were characterized by haphazard sampling methods that precluded consistently accurate forecasts (Converse 1987; Field 1983; Gallup 1972; Rosenstone 1983; Squire 1988). But by the mid1930s, Gallup, Roper, and Crossley had begun using more scientific sampling techniques to ensure that their respondents accurately represented the electorate. These and other improvements allowed Gallup to forecast the U.S. presidential elections from 1936 to 1956 with an average error of 3.9% (Rosenstone 1983). Further methodological changes in the 1950s and 1960s (Perry 1960, 1979) brought the Gallup forecasts of the national elections from 1960 through 1980 to within an average of 1.6% of the actual election results (Rosenstone 1983). Perhaps the most sweeping change made by Gallup and other preelection survey outfits has been the shift from face-to-face interviewing to telephone interviewing. Of the 430 preelection surveys examined in one recent study, fully 98% interviewed by telephone (Crespi 1988). Telephone interviews are less expensive to conduct than face-to-face interviews, and the former typically achieve higher response rates than most mail surveys, leaving them less vulnerable to nonresponse bias. Furthermore, telephone interviewing can be completed much more quickly than face-to-face and mail surveys, which permits up-to-theminute tracking of candidate support. Despite these presumed improvements in procedures, however, preelection surveys still predict some election results with significant error. In 1980, for example, all four of the major polls underestimated Ronald Reagans margin of victory over Jimmy Carter, in one case by as much as 9% (Kagay 1992). Similarly, in the 1970 British election, four of the five final polls and 19 out of 20 earlier polls placed the Labor Party in the lead (by an average of 4.3%), whereas the Conservative Party won by 2.4% (Crewe 1992). More recently, last-minute forecasts of the 1993 New Jersey governors race showed incumbent Jim Florio leading challenger Christine Todd Whitman by as much as 15%, but on Election Day Florio was unseated (Gray 1993). Of course, even in a perfectly executed survey, one would expect some discrepancy between the election forecast and the actual outcome due to sampling error, but the systematic discrepancies cited above cannot be accounted for by sampling error alone. Clearly, there is room for further improvement of preelection survey methodology. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.174 on Wed, 31 May 2017 18:33:52 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Mail Surveys for Election Forecasting? 183 Less clear, though, is how such improvements can best be achieved. In this article, we propose the consideration of self-administered mail surveys for use in election forecasting. We suggest that mail survey methodology, along with scientific sampling techniques and careful questionnaire design, may provide uniquely desirable conditions for accurately forecasting election outcomes. We begin by detailing the methods of preelection mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper in Ohio since 1980 and preelection telephone surveys by the University of Cincinnati and the University of Akron. We then compare the accuracy of the polls in forecasting the national and statewide elections every even year from 1980 to 1994 and explore the correlates of forecast accuracy. Finally, we test several possible explanations for the observed differences between the two survey modes.

Development of attitude strength over the life cycle: surge and decline.

The circumplex model of affect has been among the most widely studied representations of affect. Despite the considerable evidence cited in support of it, methods typically used to evaluate the model have substantial limitations. In this article, the authors attempt to correct past limitations by using a covariance structure model specifically designed to assess circumplex structure. This model was fit to 47 individual correlation matrices from published data sets. Analyses revealed that model fit was typically acceptable and that opposing affective states usually demonstrated strong negative correlations with one another. However, analyses also indicated substantial variability in both model fit and correlations among opposing affective states and suggested several characteristics of studies that partially accounted for this variability. Detailed examination of the locations of affective states for 10 of the correlation matrices with relatively optimal characteristics provided mixed support for the model.

Attitude Importance and the Accumulation of Attitude-Relevant Knowledge in Memory.

This article explores the relation of age to manifestations and antecedents of attitude strength. Three studies demonstrate that susceptibility to attitude change is greater during early and late adulthood than during middle adulthood. Three additional studies demonstrate that attitude importance, certainty, and perceived quantity of attitude-relevant knowledge are greater in middle adulthood than during early or late adulthood. These antecedents may therefore explain life cycle shifts in susceptibility to change. Susceptibility to change, importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge differ from one another in terms of their correlations with education, gender, and race, challenging the notion that attitude strength is a unitary construct. Evidence that people incorrectly believe that susceptibility to change declines steadily over the life course reinforces the distinction between operative and meta-attitudinal measures of attitude strength.

Exploring the Latent Structure of Strength‐related Attitude Attributes

People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, viewers were better able to remember the statements made on policy issues on which they had more personally important attitudes; (b) importance motivated selective exposure and selective elaboration: Greater personal importance was associated with better memory for relevant information encountered under controlled laboratory conditions, and manipulations eliminating opportunities for selective exposure and selective elaboration eliminated the importance-memory accuracy relation; and (c) people do not use perceptions of their knowledge volume to infer how important an attitude is to them, but importance does cause knowledge accumulation.

Conceptual and Methodological Issues in Testing the Circumplex Structure of Data in Personality and Social Psychology

Some attitudes are durable and impactful, whereas others are weak and inconsequential. Over the last few decades, researchers have identified roughly a dozen attributes of attitudes that differentiate the strong from the weak. However, considerable controversy remains regarding the relations among these attributes. Some scholars have suggested that the various strength‐related attributes reflect a small number of latent constructs, whereas others have suggested that each is a distinct construct in its own right. We review this ongoing controversy, and we then review a diverse set of recent studies that provide new evidence in support of the latter perspective. We consider the implications of our findings for the conceptualization of attitude strength and for the methods by which it is studied. Attitudes determine for each individual what he [or she] will see and hear, what he [or she] will think and what he [or she] will do …. They draw lines about, and segregate, an otherwise chaotic environment; they are our methods for finding our way about in an ambiguous universe. —Gordon W. Allport, 1935, p. 806

Mass Public Decisions on Go to War: A Cognitive-Interactionist Framework

Circumplex representations of data have enjoyed widespread popularity in personality and social psychological research. In this article we review the conceptual assumptions implied by circumplex representations and we discuss the limitations of traditional statistical methods for testing these assumptions. A relatively nontechnical overview of a new covariance structure modeling approach to testing circumplex structure is provided. The use of this approach is illustrated with two published data sets. The advantages and disadvantages of this approach relative to more traditional statistical approaches are discussed. The conclusion is that the covariance structure modeling approach has significant advantages in that it provides a closer conceptual match to the theoretical assumptions of circumplex representations, supplies information more directly relevant to circumplex representations and permits more precise and flexible testing of hypotheses derived from circumplex representations.

Distinguishing the cognitive and behavioral consequences of attitude importance and certainty: A new approach to testing the common-factor hypothesis ☆

How do Americans decide whether their country should use military force abroad? We argue they combine dispositional preferences and ideas about the geopolitical situation. This article reports the results of a representative national survey that incorporated five experiments. Findings include the following: (1) Respondent dispositions, especially isolationism versus internationalism and assertiveness versus accommodativeness, consistently constrained policy preferences, whereas liberalism-conservatism did not; (2) features of the geopolitical context—the presence of U.S. interests, relative power, the images of the adversarys motivations, and judgments about cultural status—also influenced support for military intervention; and (3) systematic interactions emerged between dispositions and geopolitical context that shed light on when and why ideological disagreements about the use of force are likely to be amplified and attenuated by situational factors. Our results are consistent with a cognitive-interactionist perspective, in which people adapt broad predispositions in relatively thoughtful ways to specific foreign policy problems.

Coping with Accountability Cross-Pressures: Low-Effort Evasive Tactics and High-Effort Quests for Complex Compromises

Some published factor analyses have suggested that attitude importance and certainty are distinct psychological constructs, but other factor analytic investigations have suggested they are largely redundant reflections of a more general underlying construct. This latter sort of finding has led investigators to average measures of importance and certainty together into a composite index and then explore its cognitive and behavioral consequences. In this paper, we report three studies gauging the underlying structure of these strength-related attitude attributes by assessing whether they in fact relate in the same ways to information processing and action tendencies. We found that importance and certainty both independently predicted the likelihood that a person attempted to persuade others to adopt his or her attitude. Importance (but not certainty) was associated with the tendency to seek out information that would enable people to use their attitudes in a subsequent judgment and only importance predicted whether or not they turned out to vote in an election to express their attitudes. Certainty (but not importance) was related to the tendency to find more than one political candidate acceptable. And importance and certainty interacted to predict the frequency with which people performed attitude-expressive behaviors. All this suggests that importance and certainty have distinct effects on thinking and behavior and supports the maintenance of conceptual and empirical distinctions between them in social psychological theory building.