U.S. Attitudes toward Terrorism and Counterterrorism: Report to the Resilient Systems Division, Science and Technology Directorate, U.S Department of Homeland Security

Existing survey data do not provide comprehensive baseline information about U.S. beliefs and attitudes on terrorism and counterterrorism. Improved understanding of public attitudes can inform programs and tools related to managing public risk perception, increasing effectiveness of pre- and post-event communication by Federal, state, and local officials, and building and supporting more resilient social networks within and across communities.In this project, systematic survey data was collected from a sample of Americans in response to a range of newly developed survey questions. The survey was developed by two leading survey methodologists, following consultations with a research team of experts who study the dynamics of terrorism, counterterrorism, and community resilience, as well as with practitioners and officials from throughout the homeland security community. The questions were administered to members of a web panel by the on-line survey firm Knowledge Networks, and a second wave of the survey will be issued approximately six months after the first wave to allow for analysis of attitudes over time.The first wave of the questionnaire was completed, from September 28, 2012 to October 12, 2012, by 1,576 individuals 18 years of age and older. The first section of the questionnaire assessed the salience of terrorism by asking respondents whether they had thought about terrorism in the preceding week, how likely they thought a terrorist attack in the United States was in the next year, and whether they had done anything differently in the past year because of the possibility of such an attack. The second section of the questionnaire posed questions about how likely respondents would be to call the police in response to various actions potentially related to terrorism and how concerned respondents felt the government should be about these actions. Respondents who said they had thought about a terrorist attack in the last week were more likely than other respondents to say they were likely to call the police in response to the various situations described to them. The survey then assessed respondents' awareness and evaluation of government efforts related to terrorism in the United States. A large majority of the respondents said that the U.S. government has been very effective (33 percent) or somewhat effective (54 percent) at preventing terrorism; less than 13 percent characterized the government as not too effective or not effective at all.In a final section of the survey, we asked respondents about two specific programs focused on increasing communication between members of the public and the government on topics related to terrorism

Question Wording as an Independent Variable in Survey Analysis

This paper renews the line of research into the effects of changes in survey question wording and form which occupied researchers during the 1940s. We suggest two reasons for the cessation of such research: the idiosyncratic nature of many of the items experimented with and the near exclusive focus on single-variable distributions. In the present study, the experiments are based on decisions that face all survey investigators: whether to use agree-disagree statements or forced choice items; whether to ask open or closed questions; whether and how to balance alternatives offered; whether to include a middle alternative; and whether or not to filterfor no opinion. Furthermore, we examine the consequences of these decisions not only for univariate distributions but also for an item's relationship to education. The results from SRC national probability samples suggest thatfor thefirst two types, as well as for items involving variations in tone of word, the decisions may affect inferences about correlations with education. For the other three types the effects are restricted mainly to changes in marginals, although the no-opinion type shows a more limited kind of interaction with education. Finally, we present evidence that index construction is not an adequate solution to the question-wording problem.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/68832/2/10.1177_004912417700600202.pd

How Social Processes Distort Measurement: The Impact of Survey Nonresponse on Estimates of Volunteer Work

Estimates of volunteering in the United States vary greatly from survey to survey and do not show the decline over time common to other measures of social capital. We argue that these anomalies are caused by the social processes that determine survey participation, in particular the propensity of people who do volunteer work to respond to surveys at higher rates than those who do not do volunteer work. Thus surveys with lower responses rates will usually have higher proportions of volunteers, and the decline in response rates over time likely has led to increasing overrepresentation of volunteers. We analyze data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS) -- the sample for which is drawn from Current Population Survey (CPS) respondents -- together with data from the CPS Volunteering Supplement to demonstrate the effects of survey nonresponse on estimates of volunteering activity and its correlates. CPS respondents who become ATUS respondents report much more volunteering in the CPS than those who become ATUS nonrespondents. This difference is replicated within demographic and other subgroups. Consequently, conventional statistical adjustments for nonresponse cannot correct the resulting bias. Although nonresponse leads to estimates of volunteer activity that are too high, it generally does not affect inferences about the characteristics associated with volunteer activity. We discuss the implications of these findings for the study of other phenomena.

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.

Epicatechins Purified from Green Tea (Camellia sinensis) Differentially Suppress Growth of Gender-Dependent Human Cancer Cell Lines

The anticancer potential of catechins derived from green tea is not well understood, in part because catechin-related growth suppression and/or apoptosis appears to vary with the type and stage of malignancy as well as with the type of catechin. This in vitro study examined the biological effects of epicatechin (EC), epigallocatechin (EGC), EC 3-gallate (ECG) and EGC 3-gallate (EGCG) in cell lines from human gender-specific cancers. Cell lines developed from organ-confined (HH870) and metastatic (DU145) prostate cancer, and from moderately (HH450) and poorly differentiated (HH639) epithelial ovarian cancer were grown with or without EC, EGC, ECG or EGCG. When untreated cells reached confluency, viability and doubling time were measured for treated and untreated cells. Whereas EC treatment reduced proliferation of HH639 cells by 50%, EGCG suppressed proliferation of all cell lines by 50%. ECG was even more potent: it inhibited DU145, HH870, HH450 and HH639 cells at concentrations of 24, 27, 29 and 30 µM, whereas EGCG inhibited DU145, HH870, HH450 and HH639 cells at concentrations 89, 45, 62 and 42 µM. When compared with EGCG, ECG more effectively suppresses the growth of prostate cancer and epithelial ovarian cancer cell lines derived from tumors of patients with different stages of disease

Survey Question Wording And Attitudes In The General Public.

PhDSocial researchUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/190241/2/7804796.pd