ANES 2022 pilot has feeling thermometers about men and women
In a prior post, I criticized the questionnaire for the ANES 2020 Time Series Study, so I want to use this post to praise the questionnaire for the ANES 2022 Pilot Study, plus add some other comments.
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1. The pilot questionnaire has items that ask participants to rate men and women on 0-to-100 feeling thermometers, which will permit assessment of the association for negative attitudes about women and men, presuming that some of the planned 1500 respondents express such negative attitudes.
2. The pilot questionnaire has items in which response options permit underestimation of the frequency of certain types of vote fraud, with a "Never" option for items about how often in the respondent's state [1] a voter casts more than one ballot and [2] votes are cast on behalf of dead people. That happened at least once recently in Arizona (see also https://www.heritage.org/
But it doesn't seem like a good idea to phrase the vote fraud item about the respondent's state, so that coding a response as a misperception requires checking evidence in 50 states. And I don't think there is an obvious threshold for overestimating how often, say, a voter casts more than one ballot. "Rarely" seems like an appropriate response for Arizona residents, but is "Occasionally" incorrect?
3. The pilot questionnaire has an item about the genuineness of emails on Hunter Biden's laptop in which Hunter Biden "contacted representatives of foreign governments about business deals". So I guess that can be a misinformation item that liberals are more likely to be misinformed about.
4. The pilot questionnaire has items about whether being White/Black/Hispanic/Asian "comes with advantages, disadvantages, or doesn't it matter". Based on the follow up item, these items might not permit respondents to select both "advantages" and "disadvantages", and, if so, it might be better to differentiate respondents who think that, for instance, being White has only advantages from respondents who think that being White has on net more advantages than disadvantages.
5. The pilot questionnaire permits respondents to report the belief that Black and Hispanic Americans have lower socioeconomic status than White Americans because of biological differences, but respondents can't report the belief that particular less positive outcomes for White Americans relative to another group are due to biological differences (e.g., average White American K12 student math performance relative to average Asian American K12 student math performance).
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Overall, the 2022 pilot seems like an improvement. For one thing, the pilot questionnaire, like is common for the ANES, has feeling thermometers about Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians, so that it's possible to construct a measure of negative attitudes about each included racial/ethnic group. And the feeling thermometers for men and women permit construction of a measure of negative attitudes about men and women. For another thing, respondents can report misperceptions that are presumably more common among persons on the political left. That's more than what is permitted by a lot of similar surveys.