A study compared people's reactions to different types of assertions concerning social issues. For purposes of the study, assertion was defined as having three components: a reference to the issue itself, an attribute having evaluative implications and a verb phrase linking the issue with the attribute. Eight types of messages were composed…

This research study was based upon a national survey in March 1992, conducted to assess the economic literacy of the U.S. public. The survey data were used to measure the economic knowledge of the public, to identify factors that affect economic knowledge, and to evaluate the influence of economic knowledge on public opinion about current economic…

Four hundred and seventy residents of Ridgewood, New Jersey, and 493 residents of Jyvaskyla, Finland, were randomly selected and interviewed about their attitudes concerning nuclear war. In each area, a high proportion of the sample believed that some kind of nuclear incident is likely in the next decade. The vast majority stated that a nuclear…

A language attitude survey was conducted in Toronto in the winter of 1978 in which 457 people of various ages, social classes, geographical backgrounds, and of both sexes were asked to listen to 20 voices representing five varieties of English and to rate them on a series of character traits and on a socio-economic status scale. The purpose was to…

Millions of people have immigrated to Israel throughout the 1900s and before. Immigration waves are considered the most important social, political, and economical turning points in the history of Israel. This study analyzes the content of Israeli children's books dealing with immigrants and immigration to determine the image of immigrants and…

The effect of a televised investigative news report on opinions of members of the general public, interest group elites, and governmental policy makers and on eventual public policy was studied. By collaboration with an investigative news team, the researchers learned in advance of the subject and air time of an "NBC News Magazine" segment…

The purposes of this study were to analyze two variables in the communication situation which may affect the influence of polls: the "ideology" of the individual respondent, consisting of three dimensions, conservative, liberal, and moderate; and the "attitude" of the individual as to information contained in the poll, consisting of two…

This paper reviews the experiments done over the past 20 years with Televote, a generic term referring to voting by telecommunications (telephone, computers, etc.) As a method of public opinion polling, it is highly innovative and responsive to many of the criticisms often levied against public opinion research. The researcher describes work at…

A study is described concerning the ability to recgnize sex bias in language. Thirty-three statements were generated containing statements characterized as sex-biased and sex-fair. It was hypothesized that individuals would have a greater degree of difficulty recognizing sex bias in statements which contained common-use terms or terms with no…

This paper examines the unobtrusive ways in which broadcasting sustains the lives and routines, from one day to the next, year in and year out, of whole populations, and reflects on some of the implications of these processes by accounting for the ways in which the times of radio and television are organized in relation to the social spaces of…

The Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) database based on the American Freshmen Survey provides data for use in making marketing and management decisions in colleges and universities. This paper describes an operational cooperative model for managing and exploiting the data that CIRP makes available. The paper also offers an example…

A cooperative effort by administrators and institutional researchers to assess the public image of an institution of higher education as one step in the planning process is described. Discussed are the interpersonal dynamics occurring in the recognition of the general problem, the formulation of specific questions, the design of the survey…

This study was conducted to determine how women in the Indian State of Tamil Nadu--where both regional and national network television are available for viewing--perceive the role of television in helping the cause of women. A television content analysis was done for two subsequent weeks, focusing on the portrayal of women in the programs, and the…

This document reports on the results of a study of the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of community participants in the educational decision-making processes. The research utilized the results of the Gallup Polls of the Public's Attitude toward Education for the years 1974, 1977, 1980, and 1983. The data sets of the Gallup Polls were…

The relative homogeneity of individual value orientations in 11 contemporary nations is the subject of this paper. In macro-sociological discussions, particularly of the polity, there are frequent assertions about the relative homogeneity of a people and of their culture, but these assertions are rarely specified or derived from quantitative…