Misinformed About the Affordable Care Act? Leveraging Certainty to Assess the Prevalence of Misperceptions

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/112231/1/jcom12165.pd

Racial Attitudes Predicted Changes in Ostensibly Race‐Neutral Political Attitudes Under the Obama Administration

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/1/pops12315_am.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/2/pops12315.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136427/3/pops12315-sup-0001-suppinfo01.pd

Referendum Design and Contingent Valuation: The NOAA Panel's No-Vote Recommendation

In 1992 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) convened a panel of prominent social scientists to assess the reliability of natural resource damage estimates derived from contingent valuation (CV). The product of the Panel's deliberations was a report that laid out a set of recommended guidelines for CV survey design, administration, and data analysis. One of the Panel's recommendations was that CV surveys should employ a referendum approach. This method describes a choice mechanism that asks each respondent how they would vote if faced with a particular program and the prospect of paying for the program through some means, such as higher taxes. The Panel also recommended that CV referendum questions which commonly use only "for" or "against" answers should be expanded to explicitly offer an "I would-not-vote" response. The purpose of this paper is to consider the effects of such a "would-not-vote" option. In developing the test, we followed the important elements of the NOAA Panel guidelines for the design and administration of a CV survey and use what was acknowledged(by the Panel) as the most carefully developed CV questionnaire to that time, that is, the State of Alaska's study of the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Our findings suggest that when those selecting the "would-not-vote" response are treated as having voted "against" the offered program, offering the option does not alter: (a) the distribution of "for" and "against" responses, (b) the estimates of WTP derived from these choices, or (c) the construct validity of the results.

Temporal Reliability of Estimates from Contingent Valuation

In 1992 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) convened a panel of prominent social scientists to assess the reliability of natural resource damage estimates derived from contingent valuation (CV). The product of the panel's deliberations was a report that laid out a set of recommended guidelines for CV survey design, administration, and data analysis. This paper focuses on one of these guidelines�the Panel's call for the "temporal averaging" of willingness-to-pay (WTP) responses obtained from CV surveys as one method for increasing their reliability. The panel suggested: "Time dependent measurement noise should be reduced by averaging across independently drawn samples taken at different points in time. A clear and substantial time trend in the responses would cast doubt on the 'reliability' of the finding." The purpose of this paper is to examine the temporal reliability of CV estimates. Our findings, using a CV instrument designed to measure willingness-to-pay for a program to protect Prince William Sound, Alaska from future oil spills, like the Exxon Valdez spill, exhibited no significant sensitivity to the timing of the interviews. For two samples involving independent interviews taken over two years apart, the distribution of respondents' choices "for" and "against" the protection program did not differ.

Was the NOAA Panel Correct About Contingent Valuation?

The past few years have seen a highly charged debate about whether contingent valuation (CV) surveys can provide valid economic measures of people's values for environmental resources. In an effort to appraise the validity of CV measures of economic value, a distinguished panel of social scientists, chaired by two Nobel laureates, was established by NOAA, to critically evaluate the validity of CV measures of nonuse value. The Panel provided an extensive set of guidelines for CV survey construction, administration, and analysis, and distinguished a subset of items from their guidelines for special emphasis and described them as burden of proof requirements. Of particular interest was the Panel's requirement that CV surveys demonstrate "responsiveness to the scope of the environmental insult." That demonstration has come to be called a scope test. The paper reports the findings from the first CV study that adheres to the NOAA Panel's guidelines and includes a formal scope test.

Why do white Americans oppose race-targeted policies? Clarifying the impact of symbolic racism

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice towar

The Impact of Social Desirability Pressures on Whites’ Endorsement of Racial Stereotypes: A Comparison Between Oral and ACASI Reports in a National Survey

In the last 60 years, the proportion of white Americans expressing anti-black prejudice in face-to-face survey interviews has declined dramatically. To test whether social desirability pressures affect the expression of anti-black prejudice, we analyzed a within-subjects experiment in the 2008 American National Election Study in which white respondents first reported their endorsement of stereotypes of blacks confidentially via audio computer-assisted self-interviewing (ACASI) and weeks or months later orally during second interviews. Shifting to ACASI led to a small but significant increase in negative views of blacks. Unexpectedly, shifting to ACASI also led to a similarly large increase in negative views of whites. Furthermore, the ACASI reports had no more predictive validity than did the oral reports. This evidence suggests that social desirability pressures do not seriously compromise oral reports of racial stereotypes in face-to-face interviews

Americans’ Attitudes toward the Affordable Care Act: What Role Do Beliefs Play?

How do people form their attitudes toward complex policy issues? Although there has long been an assumption that people consider the various components of those issues and come to an overall assessment, a growing body of recent work has instead suggested that people may reach summary judgments as a function of heuristic cues and goal-oriented rationalizations. This study examines how well a component-based model fits Americans’ evaluations of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, an important and highly contentious piece of legislation that contained several constituent parts. Despite strong partisan disagreement about the law, we find that Democrats and Republicans both appear to evaluate the law as a function of their beliefs and what the law would do as well as their confidence in those beliefs. This finding implies that correcting misperceptions and increasing awareness of the components of legislation have the potential to change attitudes