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Public Opinion Research

Public opinion research is an applied social science activity that features prominently in various academic disciplines, including communication, political science, psychology, public policy, and sociology. Public opinion research often has as its goal the quantification and description of preferences of large numbers of people in carefully described geographic areas such as cities, states, or nations. Often the specific time frame under study is particularly important, and typically public opinion is assessed on a recurring basis by firms and organizations specializing in such tasks. Some of these involve media organizations that use the results of public opinion research as the basis for news stories or to comment upon political or social events, policies, and people.

Use of Survey Research to Assess Public Opinion

Most often, public opinion as the object of empirical research is studied using some variation on the methods of survey research. A great deal of emphasis is typically placed on estimating the proportion of the adult or registered voter population holding certain attitudes toward various public affairs topics or evaluations of various public officials. Breakdowns by political party affiliation and various demographics are commonly presented. The accuracy of political polling is often verified by comparisons of poll results to election results. Although that works in an acceptable manner for polls that measure voter intention and are taken close to Election Day, it is less helpful for standard measures of political attitudes, for which there are no real-world indicators.

Much public opinion research is descriptive, that is, it attempts to estimate population parameters of various benchmark indicators such as presidential approval, the state of consumer confidence, and general levels of trust and confidence in government, among other standard questions. Such research is often done on a periodic basis, and recent results are compared to the running time-series of results of similar surveys done by the same organization. An alternative is to round up similar questions taken at the same time by different organizations, but such results are often difficult to compare directly because of slight variations in question wording, sampling and weighting strategies, various field work considerations, and other types of “house effects” that subtly influence survey results. Because such characteristics of polls or surveys tend to be consistent within the organization that produced the poll, it is usually considered most appropriate to compare results at a given time with previous results of the same poll.

Criticisms and Controversies

Public opinion research can be criticized in various ways, including that many results are less than fully useful because people have not considered the questions carefully or do not have well-formed opinions on particular matters and so invent an answer on the fly in response to a survey question. For years this sparked controversy among scholars and users of public opinion polling as the “pseudo-opinion” problem. More recent scholarly work that is informed by cognitive models addresses this by noting that such results may not be quite as serious of a problem as previously believed, largely because people may invent opinions on the spot but they do so using their values, social positions, and demographic background factors that are relatively stable. According to these “online processing models,” such responses may have substantial validity even though people have not previously considered the issue.

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