The forest behind the bar charts: bridging quantitative and qualitative research on Roma/Ţigani in contemporary Romania

ABSTRACT

Rughini? discusses three controversial issues with regard to surveys of the Romani population: ethnonym use, self-identification versus hetero-attribution of Romani ethnicity, and the use of variables in reference to Romani settlements. She uses data sets from ten surveys of Romanian Roma between 2000 and 2008 as well as the 2002 Romanian Census to compare two types of samples, and to explore the consequences of several research choices for the quality of the data. In addition to specific methodological issues, Rughini? addresses the relevance to such surveys of qualitative research in Romani communities.     

Trends in Australian and Canadian Public Service Perceptions from an Employee Survey Perspective

A comparative analysis of results from the 2011 Institute of Public Administration Australia and Institute of Public Administration of Canada surveys of public service leaders is mapped against related public sector employee survey tools results. Alignment of past results with current leader perceptions shows remarkable consistency across the jurisdictions over time. This overarching coherence points to two broad hypotheses: either senior public service leaders possess a common set of preoccupations in the modern global context, or a more critical perspective would question the shortcomings of the instruments given that remarkable change has occurred that one would expect should have driven result variance. Regardless of the conclusion brought to this preliminary analysis, ongoing identification and mapping of senior leader perceptions through such tools is celebrated as an important contribution to ongoing public service organizational health.     

“Sorry,wrong number”: Why media polls on gun control are often unreliable

Abstract

How scientific are the polls reported in the media on the gun‐control issue? Without arguing for or against gun controls, this article examines the interviewing and sampling methods used by media polls and finds that some polls claiming impressive majorities in favor of severe gun controls may not be accurate.     

Mail vs. telephone surveys of criminal justice attitudes: A comparative analysis

This study compares results from surveys using two modes of administration. A subset of questions from the 1992Texas Crime Poll, a statewide poll conducted annually by mail, was replicated in telephone interviews using the Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing System. The phone survey yielded better participation rates but less complete responses to individual attitude questions than did the mail poll. As expected, the mail survey was less expensive but less efficient than the automated phone survey. The central finding was that all but one of the responses to five attitude questions difered significantly across the surveys. The samples differed in their demographic composition, but this did not explain differences in the substantive findings from the mail and phone surveys. The discussion considers alternative explanations for differences in the findings from the two surveys and suggests direction for further comparative research.     

The Postwar Premiership League

The article reports the results from the latest survey of academic experts polled on the performance of post‐1945 prime ministers. Academic specialists in British politics and history rate Clement Attlee as the best postwar prime minister, with Margaret Thatcher in second place just ahead of Tony Blair in third place. Gordon Brown's stint in Number 10 was the third‐worst since the Second World War, according to the respondents to the survey that rated his premiership as less successful than that of John Major. The article compares public and academic opinion and rankings of prime ministers and their performance, noting significant discrepancies in contemporary and retrospective evaluations. Academic respondents to the survey also provided detailed ratings and evaluations of the performance and policy impact of the four prime ministers since 1979: Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.     

Measuring party positions and issue salience from media coverage: Discussing and cross-validating new indicators

Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.     

Surveys,Experiments, and the Landscape of International Political Economy

The contributions to this issue show that surveys and experiments offer exciting new tools for doing empirical research in international political economy (IPE). This essay cautions that the utility of these tools is not self-evident: Neither appeals to microfoundations nor to methodological individualism in constructing explanations for social phenomena themselves recommend an embrace of surveys or experiments. The field of IPE should worry that the focus on surveys and experiments will constrain not just methodological choice but also theoretical breadth, limiting the field’s ability to conceive of what theories are admissible in learning about the global political economy.     

Map of Central Asia,Western and Eastern Sectors

After first outlining the notion of anti-Semitism, the predominant survey method used for researching it, and the history of the presence and the current (near) absence of Jews in Poland, this article gives the results of different surveys of various kinds of anti-Semitism in this country, including the authors' own, and discusses the findings of their qualitative study – focus group interviews with members of three different Catholic communities from three different cities. The qualitative study confirmed the hypothesis that imagined and stereotypical rather than real Jews are the objects of modern anti-Semitism in Poland, while real historical and stereotypically perceived Jews are the objects of its religious and post-Holocaust variants. The roots of religious anti-Semitism lie in the not entirely absorbed teachings of the Catholic Church on the Jewish deicide charge. Religious anti-Semitism supports modern and post-Holocaust kinds of anti-Semitism. Modern anti-Semitism is rooted in poor education, lack of interest in the Jewish history of Poland, lack of inter-group contact, and persisting stereotypes of Jews. Among the various Catholic communities of Poles, there are considerable differences in attitudes to Jews. The qualitative study also revealed a methodological deficiency in the standard survey questions intended to measure anti-Semitism, which are sometimes understood as questions about facts rather than about opinions.     

That I'll Be Killed

Abstract

Pre-service teachers who had completed their practicum or student teaching and in-service teachers in their first 3 years of teaching (n = 218) completed open-ended surveys about their beliefs and fears of school violence and rated their fears for such acts as use of weapons and the likelihood of those acts about their fears about schools and school violence. There were significant differences between pre-service and in-service teachers in their rankings of fearful events and the perceived likelihood of these events using t-tests to compare the groups. The informants reported being most afraid of guns or other weapons or other forms of dangerous violence (hostage taking, an outside stranger coming in and threatening their students, and so on). These fears were significantly correlated with their beliefs in the likelihood that these events would happen. Open-ended questions revealed that pre-service teachers tended to be more afraid for their personal safety and personal failure in a crisis situation and in-service classroom teachers tended to be more afraid for their students' safety. The implications for teacher education and preparing teachers to address school violence are discussed.     

Voter overrepresentation,vote misreporting,and turnout bias in postelection surveys

Figures from postelection surveys often grossly overestimate election turnout. Two distinct phenomena are responsible for this gap: overrepresentation of actual voters and vote misreporting by actual nonvoters among survey respondents. Previous accounts of turnout bias are inconclusive in that they either focus on a single component, or fail to separate between the two. In this paper, we formally decompose turnout bias in election surveys into its constituent parts, assess their empirical prevalence and heterogeneity using an extensive collection of 49 vote validation studies from six countries, and employ Bayesian meta regression techniques to account for cross-study differences. Our results indicate that both election and survey characteristics such as actual voter turnout and survey response rates differentially affect the components of turnout bias. We conclude with a discussion of the threats and potentials of our findings for survey-based comparative electoral research.