UNDER WAY AND HERE TO STAY PARTY REALIGNMENT IN THE 1980s?

In recent years, the Republican party has sharply narrowed theDemocratic edge in overall party identification. Using New YorkTimes/CBS News surveys (1980–1986) and earlier NES/CPSsurveys, this analysis probes several explanations for thatpartisan change: generational replacement, conversion, and mobilization.The findings rule out conversion, give some support to mobilization,but emphasize the historically unique surge toward the GOP amongthe young since 1980. This break with the parental partisanlegacy signals the prospect of a party realignment through generationalreplacement.     

Likely (and Unlikely) Voters and the Assessment of Campaign Dynamics

Only in recent years has the "likely voter" technology beenextended to polls well in advance of an election. In the caseof the 2000 U.S. presidential election, CNN/USA Today/Galluptracking polls indicated considerable fluctuations in likelyvoter preferences, greater than among the larger pool of registeredvoters surveyed. This article explores how Gallup’s likelyvoter model exaggerates the reported volatility of voter preferencesduring the campaign. Much of the reported variation in candidatepreference reported by Gallup in that election is not due toactual voter shifts in preference but rather to changes in thecomposition of Gallup’s likely voter pool. The findingshighlight dangers of relying on samples of likely voters whenpolling well before Election Day.     

The Dream of Abundance Reconsidered

David Riesman is Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences,Emeritus, at Harvard University. A graduate of Harvard Collegeand its Law School (1931, 1934), he was introduced by Carl Friedrich,Professor of Government at Harvard, to the study of public opinionand mass communications. On the faculty of the University ofChicago (1946–1958), he came into contact with Paul Lazarsfeldin the Bureau of Applied Social Research and with the NationalOpinion Research Center. For the last 25 years most of his researchhas been in the field of higher education.     

The Impact of Age and Health on Vehicle Choices among Elders

We examine older Americans’ choice of vehicle types and the impact of age and health status on this choice. Using the 1998 and 2000 Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the 2001 HRS Consumption and Activities Mail Survey (CAMS), we estimate a multinomial logit model of older Americans’ choice of vehicle types. We find that both age and health status influence the type of vehicle purchased or leased. Compared to Americans aged 50–59, those aged 70 or older prefer passenger cars to trucks and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). We also find that elders with health problems are more likely to prefer SUVs to passenger cars than those without health problems.

GALLUP AND FORTUNE POLLS

This section contains a compilation, topically arranged, ofpoll results released by the American Institute of Public Opinion,by Fortune, and by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion.The AIPO results cover the period from October through December1941. (Previous aipo questions were reported in the July 1938,October 1939, and all subsequent issues of the QUARTERLY.) TheFortune questions are those which appeared in the October andDecember issues of the magazine, together with those taken fromthe Fortune Management Poll which appeared in the November issue.(Previous Fortune questions were reported in the March 1940and all subsequent issues of the QUARTERLY.) Releases from theCanadian Institute of Public Opinion are included for the firsttime. (The first cn>o report was issued November 29, 1941.) Under each topic, all of the Institute data are given in chronologicalorder, then all of theFortune material, also in chronologicalsequence. Dates appearing in connection with AIPO questionsare those carried in the date lines of Institute releases tosubscribing newspapers; dates following Fortune questions indicatethe issue of the magazine in which the information appeared.Institute questions are designated by AIPO; Fortune questionsby FOR; "DK" stands for "don't know"; "no op." for "no opinion." In considering these poll data, the reader should bear in mindcertain salient points of reference set forth on pages 75 and76 of the March 1940 issue of the QUARTERLY. The QUARTERLY wishesto express its appreciation to George Gallup and the AmericanInstitute of Public Opinion and to the editors of Fortune andElmo Roper for their cooperation in making these survey resultsavailable in convenient form to other students of public opinion.     

Reaching a representative sample of college students: A comparative analysis

ABSTRACT

Objective: To explore the feasibility of a random-digit dial (RDD) cellular phone survey in order to reach a national and representative sample of college students. Methods: Demographic distributions from the 2011 National Young Adult Health Survey (NYAHS) were benchmarked against enrollment numbers from the Integrated Postsecondary Education System (IPEDS). The sample quality was compared with the Harvard School of Public Health College Alcohol Study (1993), National College Health Risk Behavior Survey (1995), and National College Health Assessment (2011). Results: Overall, the NYAHS performed as well, if not better, than previous college health surveys at reaching important demographic subgroups. Conclusions: Cellular phone RDD is one feasible approach for studies of the general population of college students that can potentially generate national estimates of health behavior.     

Reviews

‘Mirror Opposites’. Steven E. Aschheim, Brothers and Strangers: The East European Jew in German and German Jewish Consciousness, 1800–1923. The University of Wisconsin Press, 1999. xxxi + 331pp. Bibliography. Illustrations. Notes. Index. ISBN: 0–299–09110–4

Hoping to Live in Harmony. Henry Abramson, A Prayer for the Government: Ukrainians and Jews in Revolutionary Times, 1917–1920. Cambridge: Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute and Center for Jewish Studies, Harvard University, 1999, xxi + 255pp. Bibl. Index. Illus. $34.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper)

A Jewish‐Russian Hybrid. Dovid Knut, Sobranniye sochineniia (Collected Works) (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Vol. 1. 1997, 417pp.; Vol. 2, 1998, 719pp. Compiled by Vladimir Khazan. Appendices. Index

Russian Jewish Intellectuals in America. Steven Cassedy, To the Other Shore: The Russian Jewish Intellectuals Who Came to America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. xxiii + 197 pp. Illus. Index. ISBN: 0691–02975‐X.     

Social closure in American elite higher education

Elite college admissions exemplify processes of social closure in which status-group conflict, organizational self-interest, the strategic use of cultural ideals of merit, and broader social trends and contingent historical events interweave to shape institutional power in the United States. The Chosen, Jerome Karabel’s monumental study of the history of college admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton from 1900 to 2005, offers a political sociology of elite recruitment and a cultural and social history of the definition of merit that has guided these three schools and shaped much current thinking about college admissions. As Max Weber reminded us, the very definition of cultural ideals of an epoch bear the stamp of elite group domination: not cultural ideals but cultural interests and their strategic uses guide institutional power. The book provides an impressive empirical demonstration of that proposition: it identifies four different definitions of merit as organizational gatekeeping tools that have guided Harvard, Yale, and Princeton over the last hundred years and shows how these definitions were molded by status-group conflict and organizational interests. This essay outlines the central arguments of Karabel’s book; it identifies key contributions for our understanding of the history, culture, organizational interests, and politics of these three institutions; it highlights the social closure framework guiding the analysis; and it reflects on a fundamental ambiguity in Karabel’s thinking about meritocratic ideals as governing principles for modern stratified societies. A review essay on Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005,

---

INQUIRY

The following interview with Awash Teklehaimanot was conducted in June 2005. Dr. Teklehaimanot is Director of the Malaria Program at Columbia University and a member of the Task Force on Malaria for the UN Millennium Project. He is a senior staff member of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, where he provides leadership in the development of the global Roll Back Malaria program. Dr. Teklehaimanot has extensive international experience in public health with particular focus on Africa. He provides technical support to malaria-endemic countries, coordinates a number of WHO-funded research activities in Africa, and spent several years as the director of Ethiopia's National Malaria Control Program. He is a professor of clinical epidemiology at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health, and has been lecturing at the Harvard School of Public Health since 1992.     

Proceedings of the Fifty-Ninth Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research

The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR)focused on "The Image of Public Opinion Research" as a record-breaking846 researchers gathered May 13–16, 2004 at its fifty-ninthannual conference at the Pointe Hilton Tapatio Cliffs Resortin Phoenix, Arizona. The conference, held in conjunction withthe World Association for Public Opinion Research’s conference,centered on "The Image of Public Opinion Research," and helpedthe AAPOR Executive Council kick off a campaign to examine whatmany perceive to be an increasingly negative image of public     

The poverty of organizational theory: Comment on: “Bourdieu and organizational analysis”

American organizational theorists have not taken up the call to apply Bourdieu’s approach in all of its richness in part because, for better or worse, evidentiary traditions render untenable the kind of sweeping analysis that makes Bourdieu’s classics compelling. Yet many of the insights found in Bourdieu are being pursued piecemeal, in distinct paradigmatic projects that explore the character of fields, the emergence of organizational habitus, and the changing forms of capital that are key to the control of modern organizations. A number of these programs build on the same sociological classics that Bourdieu built his own theory on. These share the same lineage, even if they were not directly influenced by Bourdieu.

---

Economic Status of Older Asians in the United States

Data from the 5-percent Census 2000 Public Use Microdata were utilized to examine the economic status of six Asian-only groups in the United States aged 65 and older. Japanese Americans’ economic status emulated that of older Whites; whereas, older Korean and Vietnamese economic status more closely resembled that of older Blacks. Regression results indicated that education, household size, and duration of immigration were significantly and positively related to household income for most of the Asian-only groups, supporting the theory that human capital, structural barriers, and acculturation all play a role in determination of household income for older Asian Americans.

Editor's Note

The masthead for this, the first issue of the 70^th year of publicationof Public Opinion Quarterly, lists some new members of the journal’sAdvisory and Editorial Boards. I want to welcome these scholarsof public opinion to the POQ family. Along with continuing membersof the boards, they perform essential roles in the operationof the journal, and we owe them a debt of gratitude for their     

Conference Report

Proceedings of The Sixtieth Annual Conference of The AmericanAssociation for Public Opinion Research The 2005 conference of the American Association for Public OpinionResearch (AAPOR) was held May 12–15 at the FontainebleauHotel in Miami Beach and set records in several categories.First, there were 913 registrants, easily topping last year’srecord attendance of 843 in Phoenix (which was boosted by beinga World Association for Public Opinion Research year). Amongthese attendees were five Burns "Bud" Roper Fellows, whose expenseswere covered by Roper’s generous endowment to AAPOR. Second,there was also a record number of papers and authors—atotal of 318 oral presentations and 75 posters with     

A Second Look: Is There a Latina/o Gender Gap?

SUMMARY

This research builds upon and updates Montoya's 1996 study of the Latina/o gender gap through the use of the 1999 Harvard Kennedy School/Kaiser Family Foundation/Washington Post Latino Survey. Not only do we find a gender gap across six questions related to the use of force, social compassion, and women's social roles, we also find that the size and significance of the gap varies across Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban origin respondents. Our findings challenge past research that found limited evidence of a gender gap in public opinion among Latinos and Latinas nationally, and suggest that more research is needed in order to understand how gendered experiences help to frame public opinion within different racial/ethnic groups in the United States.     

THE DECLINE OF OVER-TIME COMPARABILITY IN THE NATIONAL ELECTION STUDIES

The National Election Studies conducted by the University ofMichigan Survey Research Center and Center for Political Studiesprovide the best data set for studying the political attitudesand behavior of the American electorate. The American NationalElection Studies Data Sourcebook, which complies NES surveyresults between 1952 and 1978, demonstrates the extent to whichthese surveys facilitate over-time analysis. This article usesthe Sourcebook as a baseline and shows that there has been asubstantial decline in the over-time comparability of itemsmeasuring public policy preferences and of items measuring supportfor the political system.     

In search of a new working class

This paper examines the contemporary “theory of the new middle class” in so far as it purports to be the definitive rejection of Marx' original theory of class dynamics. Dealing with the question of an adequate definition of the “middle class,” the paper pursues two themes. First, it addresses the increasingly common argument that the various social classes in modern American society have become effectively indistinguishable in matters of consciousness and social outlooks. Second, it concerns itself with the outlook of the new working class. Data based on the 1972 – 1976 NORC General Social Surveys is examined in an attempt to clarify these issues. Author's Note: An earlier version of this paper was read at the annual meetings of the Eastern Sociological Society in New York, March 19, 1977. Data were made available by the National Opinion Research Center, Roper Public Opinion Research Center, and the Survey Archive for the Social Sciences, whose assistance is gratefully acknowledged. I also thank the University Computing Center and the Social and Demographic Research Institute (both of the University of Massachusetts) for their contributions to the research. Finally, my thanks to Richard Hamilton for detailed comments on an earlier draft, to Marianne Pietras for assistance in the data analysis, and to the Thursday Night Nine for sharpening my interest in problems of class and class structure in industrial society. Analysis and conclusions, of course, are my responsibility.     

Online meetings for 12‐Step and other support groups

The study showing that Alcoholics Anonymous as as effective, or more effective, than psychotherapy (see “Research: AA is better pathway to abstinence than psychotherapy,” ADAW March 16, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/adaw.32655 ) was published a few days before COVID‐19 federal and state restrictions on group gatherings (“social distancing”) took effect, making AA and other meetings untenable. This seems like cruel timing. But John Kelly, Ph.D., one of the authors of the study, provided the below infographic to ADAW on other meetings. And Keith Humphreys, Ph.D., co‐author, was quoted recently on ABC News saying that he is concerned about patients with extreme mental health issues such as addiction, for whom face‐to‐face contact is key.