They do things differently there

From a 1959 French survey:

"When you were, let's say between 8 and 12 years of age what did you usually drink at meals?"

Only water            22%

wine with water added 44%

a little wine, pure    4%

cider                 15%

beer                  10%

other                  4%

There was a series of questions about the first time you had "the impression that you had drank a little too much."  One of them asked "Was it at a particular occasion and which one?"

15% Ceremonies of a family character very often religious followed by celebrations 
 8% Gatherings [at a] family meal 
11% Gathering [of] friends
 7% Popular celebrations
 8% Usual drinking excess marking the beginning of adult life
 3% During work
 2% At the army
 4% Curiosity or childhood feat unknown to the adults
 4% Accidentally, exceptionally, taken surprise by circumstances
 2% Other answers
36% Don't know or don't remember


"How did your parents react when they observed that you had effectively drunk a little too much for the first time?  Were they..."

amused                        11%
kind                          16%
did they think it was normal   4%
judged you severely            4%
they didn't know about it     20%
No answer                     40%


The question about the occasion on which you first drank a little too much was open-ended:  people gave whatever answer they wanted and later someone classified it into the categories.  The report gave some examples of people's answers:

"It's sad to say but it was my first communion"
"pig fair"
"when I buried my life as a boy"
"I was an apprentice for an old gardener who made me drink"
"after school, to celebrate his little brother's birth, a friend took me to a cafe"
"I had gone to be paid by a wine-grower and they made me taste their wine"
"to be a braggart"
"I was coming back from a long stay in England where I had drunk only water"
"it was at boarding school, we were well taken care of"

Will this reading be on the test?

My friend and colleague Brad Wright has included several plugs for this blog on his own blog.  Brad is interested in religion, so here's a finding for him, from a 1965 Gallup Poll.  The survey asked people whether they'd done various things--there was no particular logic to the list, which included flying in a plane, eating caviar, and betting money at a race track (more common than I would have guessed).  One of the items was "read the Bible through--every word."  20% of the respondents said they had.  The straightforward interpretation is that 20% of Americans had read the Bible all the way through, but I find that hard to believe.  The Bible is a long book, and as a college professor I have a good sense of the chance that people will read long books all the way through.

Another possibility is "social desirability bias"--people are giving the answer that they think they "ought" to give, rather than telling the truth.  If the question involved general frequency of reading the Bible or attending religious services, social desirability might be an important factor.  But I don't think many people imagine that the world will think worse of them if they skipped a few of the minor prophets.  Also, the way that the question was asked cut down on the risk--it gave them a list and asked them to read off the letters designating the things they had done.  So you didn't have to explicitly say "no"--you just had to leave the letter "p" off of your list. 

A third  possibility, which I find the most plausible, is that most of these people thought they had read the Bible all the way through, even though they probably hadn't actually done so.  How would this be possible?  My guess is that many people who attended church frequently, or had done so at some point in their lives, figured that given the Bible reading involved they must have covered it all over the course of time, even if not in consecutive order. 

Another question in the list asked if you'd read a book all the way through since leaving school.  Of the people who said they hadn't, 12% said they'd read every word of the Bible.  People who'd gone to college were most likely to say that they'd read the entire Bible (26%), but people who'd just reached grades 8-11 were almost as likely (22%).  Among high school graduates who hadn't attended college, it was only 15%.

Are we downhearted?

A CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll question:  "As you may know, the United States went through a depression in the 1930s in which roughly one out of four workers were unemployed, banks failed across the country, and millions of ordinary Americans were temporarily homeless or unable to feed their families. Do you think it is very likely, somewhat likely, not very likely, or not likely at all that another depression like that will occur in the US within the next 12 months?"

                       Oct 2008  Oct 2008   Dec 2008   Mar 2009  July 2009  Dec 2009
Very            21%      12%     10%     12%      12%     17%
Somewhat        38%      29%     28%     33%      29%     26%
Not very        29%      35%     41%     36%      36%     39%
Not likely      13%      24%     20%     18%      22%     19%

There was a substantial change between the first two surveys, which were only two weeks apart (Oct 3-5 and 17-19), but very little change since then.  I'm not even sure if the differences among the last five surveys are statistically significant.  (If you want to calculate it yourself, the sample sizes are about 1,000 for each survey).  After a year when the worst didn't happen, it would be reasonable to think that it wasn't going to happen in the next year.  But that wasn't how people reacted.  

The improvement over a two-week period in October 2008 is also interesting.  The TARP bill was signed into law on Oct 3.  Maybe the process leading up to that contributed to a sense of panic, and people just bounced back after a few weeks.  Or maybe something positive happened between early and mid-October that affected people's outlook, although I don't remember the history well enough to think of what that might be.

Elitism, part 2

As I said in my last post, very few surveys have asked about elites or elitism.  But back in 1996, a Gallup/CNN/USA Today poll asked whether the description "The Party of the Elite class in this country" applied more to the Democrats or the Republicans.  The results:  65% Republican, 19% Democrats, 4% both, 4% neither, 8% don't know.  Opinions differed by political views, but even among extreme conservatives, more people said Republicans than Democrats (32% to 30%). 

But political commentators seem to have a very different impression--many of them are convinced that the Democrats are really the party of the elites.  For example, in the New York Times Book Review a few weeks ago, Christopher Caldwell (a conservative) says that 19 out of the 20 richest Zip codes "gave the bulk of their money to the Democrats in the last election", while Jonathan Alter (a liberal) says it's only 8 out of 10.

Of course, 1996 was a while ago, and maybe popular opinion changed since then.  But the gap between public opinion and what might be called elite opinion on the subject is still impressive. 

Elitism, part 1

Elitism is in the news these days (there's a story in today's New York Times called "Elitism: The Charge Obama Can’t Shake", and it has 316 reader comments as I write this). A few years ago, I looked for survey questions on the topic, and to my surprise, found very few.  There was one interesting survey, and I'm going to do a post on it in a few days, but in checking for more recent questions I found one that deserves an entry by itself.

This was in June 2004--a Pew survey asked:  "Does the phrase...'he is a wealthy elitist' better describe John Kerry, George W. Bush or don't you think it describes either of them"  20% said Kerry, 27% said Bush, 25% said neither, 14% volunteered that it described both of them, and 15% weren't sure.  Almost everyone who commented on the 2004 election said that one of Kerry's biggest problem was that he came across as aloof and elitist,  while Bush somehow managed to seem like a regular guy despite his wealth and background.  But it seems like more ordinary voters actually saw Bush as the elitist.  True, this survey was taken early in the campaign, and maybe more people came to see Kerry as a wealthy elitist as the campaign went on.   But people knew Bush well by this time, so why didn't he do better?

There ain't half been some clever bastards

In 1952, a Gallup Poll asked people if they could identify some famous people (the questions were introduced as things that "might be on a radio quiz program").  Answers that said what a person did were counted as correct, and those that just gave his nationality were counted as "approximately correct."  In 1975, a Gallup poll asked respondents to identify the same people.  This time, the answers were just counted as correct or incorrect, and they didn't explain what it took to be correct.  So I give two figures for 1952--the first just counts correct and the second includes approximately correct.  The results:
 

              1952    1975

Beethoven    62 63    84

Raphael      30 30    35

Tolstoy      17 23    29

Freud        16 21    47

Aristotle    25 33    44

Rubens       15 15    24

Shakespeare  78 80    89

Gutenberg    17 24    24

Karl Marx    26 32    41

Napoleon     57 66    58

Columbus     88 89    92

Regardless of how you count the "approximate" answers, there were gains from 1952 to 1975, and in some cases big gains (e. g., Freud).  In a way, that's not surprising, since levels of formal education increased over that time.  But levels of political knowledge (things like ability to name public officials or knowing which party controlled Congress) haven't changed much since about 1950.  So the good news is that people were learning something during the 1960s and 1970s.  

As is often the case, the question hasn't been asked recently.  There are a lot more surveys than there used to be, but they tend to focus more heavily on politics.  I'd gladly sacrifice a few more questions on whether you approve of the job Congress is doing for a repeat of this one. 

Post-racial society, 1949

A Gallup Poll in 1949 contained the question "Scientists are reported to be working on a drug that may be able to turn colored skins white. If such a drug were developed, people with colored skins who wanted to could turn (bleach) their skins white. Do you think this would be a good thing or a bad thing?" I don't know whether there really was talk of something like this at the time or whether it was just something they made up. In any case, 11% said it would be a good thing, 77% a bad thing, and the rest weren't sure.

• Who was in favor? The survey asked about vote in the 1948 Presidential election. The two major party candidates, Truman (D) and Dewey (R), were both pretty progressive on civil rights by the standards of the time. There were also two minor-party candidates. On the left, there was Henry Wallace, who was a strong supporter of civil rights. On the right there was Strom Thurmond, the Governor of South Carolina, running under the States' Rights (Dixiecrat) party, which was about preserving segregation (this was the same Strom Thurmond who later was elected to the Senate, switched to the Republicans and served in the Senate until 2003).

• 11% of Truman's voters thought the drug would be a good idea. Opinions among Dewey's supporters were just about the same, also at 11%. But 28% of Wallace's supporters thought it would be a good idea, compared to 0% of Thurmond's. None of Thurmond's supporters were undecided, either: 100% thought it would be a bad idea. There were only 40 Thurmond voters in the data set, but it's still pretty unusual to get unanimity in a group of that size. White southerners as a whole were strongly opposed, with 4% saying it would be a good idea and 6% unsure.

• So basically, it seems like people with progressive views were more favorable. (That's also true if you compare using some other variables related to political outlook). Blacks, however, were not favorable--only 10% thought it would be a good idea, with 7% not sure.