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Opinion Surveys (opinion + survey)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	35%
Psychology	29%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	17%

Kinds of Opinion Surveys

public opinion survey

Selected Abstracts

Redesigning Corporate Governance Structures and Systems for the Twenty First Century

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2001
Robert A.G. Monks
How a corporation is governed has become in recent years an increasingly important element in how it is valued by the market place. McKinsey & Company in June 2000 published the results of an Investor Opinion Survey of attitudes about the corporate governance of portfolio companies. The survey gathered responses about investment intentions from over 200 institutions who together manage approximately $3.25 trillion in assets. Ranging from 17 per cent in the US and Britain to over 27 per cent in Venezuela, investors placed a specific premium on what was called "Board Governance". To put this into perspective, consider how greatly sales would have to increase, expenses be cut and margins improved to achieve a comparable impact on value. "For purposes of the survey, a well governed company is defined as having a majority of outside directors on the board with no management ties; holding formal evaluations of directors; and being responsive to investor requests for information on governance issues. In addition, directors hold significant stockholdings in the company, and a large proportion of directors' pay is in the form of stock options." This correlation of governance with market value by one of the most respected consulting companies in the world creates the foundations of a new language for management accountability. McKinsey has great credibility as a value-adding advisor to corporate managements. Governance is not a cause or a theology for McKinsey; it is an important element in the value of an enterprise. By getting the opinion of what we call Global Investors with portfolios of holdings on every continent, McKinsey has importantly impacted the cost of capital for all corporations henceforth. Admittedly, McKinsey's criteria of "board governance" are blunt. "Every organization attempting to accomplish something has to ask and answer the following question," writes Harvard Business School professor Michael C. Jensen in the introduction to his recent working paper: "What are we trying to accomplish? Or, put even more simply: When all is said and done, how do we measure better versus worse? Even more simply: How do we keep score... . I say long-term market value to recognize that it is possible for markets not to know the full implications of a firm's policies until they begin to show up.... Value creation does not mean succumbing to the vagaries of the movements in a firm's values from day to day. The market is inevitably ignorant of many of our actions and opportunities, at least in the short run...". Surprisingly little attention is paid to what we all intuitively know, that talented people are not entirely motivated by financial compensation. Directors therefore must pay special attention to creating an appropriate environment for stimulating optimum management performance. [source]

Public Opinion Surveys and the Formation of Privacy Policy

JOURNAL OF SOCIAL ISSUES, Issue 2 2003
Oscar H. Gandy Jr.
The laws that condition the boundaries that separate the public from the private spheres shape our expectations of privacy. Public opinion helps to shape the development and implementation of those laws. Commercial firms in the information-intensive industries have been the primary sponsors of public opinion surveys introduced into testimony as assessments of the public's will. Representatives of business and consumer organizations have relied upon the same industry-sponsored surveys to frame their arguments in support of or in opposition to specific privacy policies. In the past 25 years, references to public opinion have been used to frame the public as concerned, differentiated and, most recently, as willing to negotiate their privacy demands. [source]

Religion and Reproductive Genetics: Beyond Views of Embryonic Life?

JOURNAL FOR THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF RELIGION, Issue 4 2007
JOHN H. EVANS
Advances in new reproductive genetic technologies have spawned a very polarized public and political debate. As with the abortion debate, most formal opposition to these technologies comes from religious organizations that are concerned about embryonic and fetal life. In this article we conduct an analysis of the first nationally representative opinion survey on religion and reproductive genetics. We find, as in the abortion debate, that evangelicals, fundamentalists, and traditionalist Catholics are more opposed than more liberal religious groups. When we compare respondents with the same views on embryonic life, we find that differences remain in the level of approval for genetic technologies, suggesting that there is more to this debate than concern about embryos. We also find that religious conservatives are more distinct from the religious nonattenders in their views of health objectives of reproductive genetic technologies and less distinct in their views of improvement objectives. [source]

Homelessness in the US and Germany: a cross-national analysis,

JOURNAL OF COMMUNITY & APPLIED SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 3 2003
Carolyn J. Tompsett
Abstract A public opinion survey was administered by telephone to nationally representative samples in the US and Germany to assess prevalence of homelessness as well as attitudes, opinions and knowledge regarding homelessness. Lower prevalence rates were found in Germany as compared with the US. German respondents demonstrated higher levels of general compassion, greater support for the public rights of the homeless, a greater tendency to view the homeless as trustworthy, and were more likely to view economic factors and less likely to view personal failings as integral to the problem of homelessness. Respondent age, gender, and political affiliation predicted many public opinion variables. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Staff survey results and characteristics that predict assault and injury to personnel working in mental health facilities

AGGRESSIVE BEHAVIOR, Issue 1 2003
Julie Cunningham
Abstract The purpose of this study was to complete a mental health staff opinion survey to identify patient and staff characteristics associated with staff assault and injury in psychiatric treatment settings and to develop a model of prediction for staff assault and injury utilizing these survey variables. The data consisted of opinion surveys sent to staff of 15 child, adolescent, and adult psychiatry inpatient units in the United States. Multivariate logistic regression was used to determine the level of assault and staff-reported injury prediction that could be obtained from the staff-completed opinion survey. Responses indicated a high prevalence of reported aggression, with 62.3% of staff endorsing verbal and physical aggression, property destruction, and self-injurious behavior as being prevalent at their site, whereas only 4.1% rated none of these as prevalent. Staff working with children and adolescents in settings with high rates of psychiatric diagnoses reported increased frequency of assault and injury compared with those working with adults. Younger, less experienced staff reported higher rates of assault and injury. Staff working with female patients reported similar rates of assault and injury to those working with males. A logistic regression analysis using staff-reported survey results of both staff and patient characteristics predicted assault correctly 73.7% of the time and injury 66.1% of the time. Resources for violence prevention and staff training programs in violence prevention are needed in child and adolescent psychiatry wards. Results are consistent with theories emphasizing the importance of negative emotions and affects, impulsivity, and frustration in goal-directed activities in human aggression. Aggr. Behav. 29:31,40, 2003. © 2003 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source]

A multifaceted sensitivity analysis of the Slovenian public opinion survey data

JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL STATISTICAL SOCIETY: SERIES C (APPLIED STATISTICS), Issue 2 2009
Caroline Beunckens
Summary., Many models to analyse incomplete data have been developed that allow the missing data to be missing not at random. Awareness has grown that such models are based on unverifiable assumptions, in the sense that they rest on the (incomplete) data only in part, but that inferences nevertheless depend on what the model predicts about the unobserved data, given the observed data. This explains why, nowadays, considerable work is being devoted to assess how sensitive models for incomplete data are to the particular model chosen, a family of models chosen and the effect of (a group of) influential subjects. For each of these categories, several proposals have been formulated, studied theoretically and/or by simulations, and applied to sets of data. It is, however, uncommon to explore various sensitivity analysis avenues simultaneously. We apply a collection of such tools, some after extension, to incomplete counts arising from cross-classified binary data from the so-called Slovenian public opinion survey. Thus for the first time bringing together a variety of sensitivity analysis tools on the same set of data, we can sketch a comprehensive sensitivity analysis picture. We show that missingness at random estimates of the proportion voting in favour of independence are insensitive to the precise choice of missingness at random model and close to the actual plebiscite results, whereas the missingness not at random models that are furthest from the plebiscite results are vulnerable to the influence of outlying cases. Our approach helps to illustrate the value of comprehensive sensitivity analysis. Ideas are formulated on the methodology's use beyond the data analysis that we consider. [source]

Race, Gender, and Communications in Natural Disasters

POLICY STUDIES JOURNAL, Issue 4 2007
Darrell M. West
We examine public attitudes toward vulnerability and evacuation in hurricane natural disasters. Using the results of an opinion survey in a coastal, New England state, we find important differences in how men and women, and Whites and minorities perceive natural disasters. Race, gender, and geographic proximity to the coast affect how vulnerable people believe their residence is to a major hurricane, while government officials and media reporting telling people to evacuate influence evacuation decisions. In order to avoid future breakdowns, governments need to understand the different information processing approaches of various groups of people. [source]

E-Government and the Transformation of Service Delivery and Citizen Attitudes

PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION REVIEW, Issue 1 2004
Darrell M. West
The impact of new technology on public-sector service delivery and citizens' attitudes about government has long been debated by political observers. This article assesses the consequences ofe-government for service delivery, democratic responsiveness, and public attitudes over the last three years. Research examines the content of e-government to investigate whether it is taking advantage of the interactive features of the World Wide Web to improve service delivery, democratic responsiveness, and public outreach. In addition, a national public opinion survey examines the ability of e-government to influence citizens' views about government and their confidence in the effectiveness of service delivery. Using both Web site content as well as public assessments, I argue that, in some respects, the e-government revolution has fallen short of its potential to transform service delivery and public trust in government. It does, however, have the possibility of enhancing democratic responsiveness and boosting beliefs that government is effective. [source]

Stereotype Threat and Race of Interviewer Effects in a Survey on Political Knowledge

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 1 2003
Darren W. Davis
Social desirability is generally thought to underlie the propensity for survey respondents to tailor their answers to what they think would satisfy or please the interviewer. While this may in fact be the underlying motivation, especially on attitudinal and opinion questions, social desirability does not seem to be an adequate explanation for interviewer effects on factual questions. Borrowing from the social psychology literature on stereotype threat, we test an alternative account of the race-of-interviewer effects. Stereotype threat maintains that the pressure to disconfirm and to avoid being judged by negative and potentially degrading stereotypes interferes with the processing of information. We argue that the survey context contains many parallels to a testing environment in which stereotype threat might alter responses to factual questions. Through a series of framing experiments in a public opinion survey and the reliance on the sensitivity to the race of the interviewer, our results are consistent with expectations based on a theory of "stereotype threat." African American respondents to a battery of questions about political knowledge get fewer answers right when interviewed by a white interviewer than when interviewed by an African American interviewer. The observed differences in performance on the political knowledge questions cannot be accounted for by differences in the educational background or gender of the respondents. [source]

Is there more assimilation in Catalonia than in the Basque Country?

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 6 2008
Analysing dynamics of assimilation in nationalist contexts
This article builds on recent attempts in political science to illuminate the ,micro-level' mechanisms of identity formation. It analyses the dynamics of assimilation in two similar contexts with extremely salient regional-nationalist movements: Catalonia and the Basque Country. It poses the question: In which of the two regions has there been more assimilation of demographically significant, internal-immigrant segments of the population? It tests whether there has been more assimilation in Catalonia , a result expected from the allegedly more ,civic' nature of the nationalist movement there. To do so, it draws on and goes beyond the tools provided by David Laitin for operationalising assimilation. It uses existing public opinion surveys to construct and present assimilation indices for both regions. The authors show that though rates of ,linguistic adaptation' are higher in Catalonia, such adaptation correlates weakly with assimilation into feelings of subjective identification and the espousal of nationalist views and aspirations more generally. The article goes on to demonstrate that rates of assimilation, when measured using several more robust proxies for the feeling of national identity, are actually lower in Catalonia. The authors then proceed to provide a theoretical explanation for their surprising empirical results. The explanation stresses the causal role of institutional pressures , themselves the product of nationalist coalition-building strategies , in accounting for patterns of linguistic adaptation and of cultural assimilation. Furthermore, it emphasises the relevance of ,cultural demography', particularly among natives/insiders, in accounting for the different nationalist strategies and the different intensity as well as different types of institutional pressures faced by immigrants/outsiders in the two regions. [source]

Partisan responses to Europe: Comparing Finnish and Swedish political parties

EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL RESEARCH, Issue 2 2001
KARL MAGNUS JOHANSSON
This article analyzes party responses to European integration in Finland andSweden. We argue that such responses are shaped by seven explanatory factors: basic ideology, public opinion, factionalism, leadership influence, party competition, transnational links, and the development of integration. Each factor can lead to a positive or a negative evaluation of the European Union. In the empirical analysis, the sample includes all parties represented in the respective national parliaments, and the research material consists of party documents, parliamentary votes, statements by leading party figures, public opinion surveys, direct observation and interviews. Party competition and leadership influence are the strongest factors in the Finnish case, while public opinion and factionalism are the strongest factors in Sweden. Issue avoidance combined with the secondary importance of the EU in party politics explain why parties have been relatively successful in containing internal factionalism and discord, especially in Finland. [source]

Staff survey results and characteristics that predict assault and injury to personnel working in mental health facilities

Privacy and Commercial Use of Personal Data: Policy Developments in the United States

JOURNAL OF CONTINGENCIES AND CRISIS MANAGEMENT, Issue 1 2003
Priscilla Regan
In the online and offline worlds, the value of personal information , especially information about commercial purchases and preferences , has long been recognised. Exchanges and uses of personal information have also long sparked concerns about privacy. Public opinion surveys consistently indicate that overwhelming majorities of the American public are concerned that they have lost all control over information about themselves and do not trust organisations to protect the privacy of their information. Somewhat smaller majorities favour federal legislation to protect privacy. Despite public support for stronger privacy protection, the prevailing policy stance for over thirty years has been one of reluctance to legislate and a preference for self-regulation by business to protect privacy. Although some privacy legislation has been adopted, policy debates about the commercial uses of personal information have been dominated largely by business concerns about intrusive government regulation, free speech and the flow of commercial information, costs, and effectiveness. Public concerns about privacy, reflected in public opinion surveys and voiced by a number of public interest groups, are often discredited because individuals seem to behave as though privacy is not important. Although people express concern about privacy, they routinely disclose personal information because of convenience, discounts and other incentives, or a lack of understanding of the consequences. This disconnect between public opinion and public behaviour has been interpreted to support a self-regulatory approach to privacy protections with emphasis on giving individuals notice and choice about information practices. In theory the self-regulatory approach also entails some enforcement mechanism to ensure that organisations are doing what they claim, and a redress mechanism by which individuals can seek compensation if they are wronged. This article analyses the course of policy formulation over the last twenty years with particular attention on how policymakers and stakeholders have used public opinion about the commercial use of personal information in formulating policy to protect privacy. The article considers policy activities in both Congress and the Federal Trade Commission that have resulted in an emphasis on "notice and consent." The article concludes that both individual behaviour and organisational behaviour are skewed in a privacy invasive direction. People are less likely to make choices to protect their privacy unless these choices are relatively easy, obvious, and low cost. If a privacy protection choice entails additional steps, most rational people will not take those steps. This appears logically to be true and to be supported by behaviour in the physical world. Organisations are unlikely to act unilaterally to make their practices less privacy invasive because such actions will impose costs on them that are not imposed on their competitors. Overall then, the privacy level available is less than what the norms of society and the stated preferences of people require. A consent scheme that is most protective of privacy imposes the largest burden on the individual, as well as costs to the individual, while a consent scheme that is least protective of privacy imposes the least burden on the individual, as well as fewer costs to the individual. Recent experience with privacy notices that resulted from the financial privacy provisions in Gramm-Leach-Bliley supports this conclusion. Finally, the article will consider whether the terrorist attacks of 11 September have changed public opinion about privacy and what the policy implications of any changes in public opinion are likely to be. [source]

Public Perceptions of Biotechnology

JOURNAL OF FOOD SCIENCE, Issue 9 2002
K. Blaine
ABSTRACT: Through commercial application, biotechnology may improve health, agriculture, farming practices and the quality of foods. However, along with the array of potential benefits are potential risks and uncertainties surrounding the commercial applications of biotechnology. Public support for a controversial technology such as agricultural biotechnology is crucial for deriving any benefits associated with the technology. Surveys are one tool to gauge public reactions and attitudes over time, and in identifying underlying concerns regarding a technology. This review article is built on the results of a collection of public opinion surveys on some aspects of biotechnology and its applications that have been conducted to date. [source]

Public Opinion Surveys and the Formation of Privacy Policy

A publication power approach for identifying premier information systems journals

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 2 2008
Clyde W. Holsapple
Stressing that some universities have adopted unrealistic requirements for tenure of information systems (IS) faculty members, a recent editorial in MIS Quarterly contends that the group of premier IS journals needs to be generally recognized as having more than just two members. This article introduces the publication power approach to identifying the premier IS journals, and it does indeed find that there are more than two. A journal's publication power is calculated from the actual publishing behaviors of full-time, tenured IS faculty members at a sizable set of leading research universities. The underlying premise is that these researchers produce excellent work, collectively spanning the IS field's subject matter, and that the greatest concentrations of their collective work appear in highest visibility, most important journals suitable for its subject matter. The new empirically based approach to identifying premier IS journals (and, more broadly, identifying journals that figure most prominently in publishing activity of tenured IS researchers) offers an attractive alternative to promulgations by individuals or cliques (possibly based on outdated tradition or vested interests), to opinion surveys (subjective, possibly ill-informed, vague about rating criteria, and/or biased in various ways), and to citation analyses (which ignore semantics of references and, in the case of ISI impact factors, have additional problems that cast considerable doubt on their meaningfulness within the IS field and its subdisciplines). Results of the publication power approach can be applied and supplemented according to needs of a particular university in setting its evaluation standards for IS tenure, promotion, and merit decisions. [source]

Political Competition and Ethnic Identification in Africa

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF POLITICAL SCIENCE, Issue 2 2010
Benn Eifert
This article draws on data from over 35,000 respondents in 22 public opinion surveys in 10 countries and finds strong evidence that ethnic identities in Africa are strengthened by exposure to political competition. In particular, for every month closer their country is to a competitive presidential election, survey respondents are 1.8 percentage points more likely to identify in ethnic terms. Using an innovative multinomial logit empirical methodology, we find that these shifts are accompanied by a corresponding reduction in the salience of occupational and class identities. Our findings lend support to situational theories of social identification and are consistent with the view that ethnic identities matter in Africa for instrumental reasons: because they are useful in the competition for political power. [source]