Researchers using survey data to study religious commitment often create additive indices in which respondents receive a "point" on the scale for each behavior in which they engage, implicitly assuming that each activity is equally normative in each religious tradition. This has led some scholars to suggest that these scales can be "biased" in favor of evangelicals. In this paper, we introduce a unique series of survey questions asking respondents how important various activities are "for people of your religion." We use these new measures to generate tradition-specific weights for each component of a religious commitment scale according to the activity's perceived importance. We then present a method for constructing scales when such "importance" items are not available, using the frequency of behavior within each religious tradition as a surrogate for importance. We find that constructing religious commitment scales that take into account the normative differences across religious traditions produces statistically significant differences in the levels of commitment by religious tradition, especially among Roman Catholics. However, the substantive significance is less evident. When various measures of religious commitment are included as independent variables in multivariate models of political attitudes, their performance is remarkably similar. It appears that the standard additive indices of religious commitment commonly utilized by scholars of religion and politics are adequate for most analyses of social and political attitudes.
Social science researchers have increasingly come to utilize Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
In public opinion research, response latency is a measure of attitude accessibility, which is the ease or swiftness with which an attitude comes to mind when a respondent is presented with a survey question. Attitude accessibility represents the strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an evaluation of the object. Recent research shows that attitude accessibility, as measured by response latency, casts light on a wide range of phenomena of public opinion and political behavior. We discuss response latency methodology for survey research and advocate the use of latent response latency timers (which are invisible both to respondents and interviewers) as a low cost, low-maintenance alternative to traditional methods of measuring response latency in public opinion surveys. We show that with appropriate model specification latent response latency timers may provide a suitable alternative to the more complicated and expensive interviewer-activated timers.
In this study I adopt a view of cultural conflict that extends beyond the usual set of controversial ''moral'' issues like abortion and gay rights to include symbolic issues related to patriotism and group affect. Using a set of survey items asking about respondents' preferences in child-rearing, I create a measure of individuals' orientations toward authority that proves to be a potent predictor of attitudes on cultural issues, affect toward social groups, party identification, and vote choice. This authority effect persists even in the presence of extensive multivariate controls for demographic and religious variables. I find that both authority measures and religion measures shape political attitudes, suggesting the need for a multi-faceted approach to understanding cultural conflict.
This study uses response latency, the time required for a survey respondent to formulate an answer upon hearing a question, to examine the accessibility of partisan self-identifications over the course of a political campaign season. Although the aggregate distribution of partisanship remains fairly stable during the campaign, party identifications become more accessible to individuals with weaker party identifications as the election approaches. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the authors find that partisan orientations are more useful in forming political judgments when those orientations are more accessible to the voter. The effect of partisanship on vote choice is a third greater for voters with highly accessible party identifications than for those with less accessible party identifications.
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