A Different Take on the Deliberative Poll: Information, Deliberation, and Attitude Constraint

Opinion pollsters, political scientists, and democratic theoristshave long been concerned with the normative and methodologicalimplications of nonattitudes (Converse 1964). Of the proposedremedies to the weak and labile attitudinal responses profferedby an uninformed and disinterested public, perhaps the mostambitious to date has been Fishkin’s concept of the deliberativepoll (Fishkin 1991, 1995, 1997). Combining probability samplingwith information intervention and increased deliberation affordsa unique insight into what might be considered the true "voiceof the people." Yet, while deliberative polling draws heavilyon the general notion of political sophistication (Luskin 1987),empirical analyses have tended to focus almost entirely on howthe process of deliberation impacts on marginal totals of attitudeitems at both the individual and aggregate level (Fishkin 1997;Luskin, Fishkin, and Jowell 2002; Sturgis 2003). Little attention,in contrast, has been paid to outcomes that relate to otherdimensions of opinion quality, such as attitude constraint.Constraint refers to the level of consistency between attitudeswithin an individual belief system that arises from a combinationof logical, social, and psychological factors (Converse 1964).In this article we analyze data from five deliberative pollsconducted in the United Kingdom in the 1990s in order to investigatethe impact of political information and deliberation on attitudeconstraint. Across a broad range of issue areas we evaluatethe extent to which the deliberative process impacts on statisticalassociations among attitude items between the first and subsequentwaves of the polls. We conclude by discussing the implicationsof our results for the validity and reliability of survey measuresof the attitude and the broader utility of the deliberativepolling method as a tool of social scientific inquiry.     

Development of a screen for ongoing intimate partner violence

A five-question Ongoing Abuse Screen (OAS) was developed to evaluate ongoing intimate partner violence. Our hypothesis was that the OAS was more accurate and more likely to reflect ongoing intimate partner violence than the AAS when compared to the Index of Spouse Abuse (ISA). The survey included the ISA, the OAS, and the AAS. During the busiest emergency department hours, a sampling of 856 patients completed all aspects of the survey tool. Comparisons were made between the two scales and the ISA. The accuracy, positive predictive value, and positive likelihood ratio were 84%, 58%, and 6.0 for the OAS and 59%, 33%, and 2.0 for the AAS. The OAS was more accurate, had a better positive predictive value, and was three times more likely to detect victims of ongoing intimate partner violence than the AAS. Because the OAS was still not accurate enough, we developed a new screen, based on the ISA, titled the Ongoing Violence Assessment Tool (OVAT).     

Exploring the Dimensionality of Trust in Risk Regulation

This article investigates possible differential levels of trust in government regulation across five different risk contexts and the relationship between a number of concepts that might be thought of as comprising distinctive "dimensions" of trust. It appeared that how people perceive government and its policies toward risk regulation was surprisingly similar for each of the five risk cases. A principal-component analysis showed that the various trust items could best be described by two dimensions: a general trust dimension, which was concerned with a wide range of trust-relevant aspects, such as competence, care, fairness, and openness, and a scepticism component that reflects a sceptical view regarding how risk policies are brought about and enacted. Again, the results were surprisingly similar across the five risk cases, as the same solution was found in each of the different samples. It was also examined whether value similarity has an additional value in predicting trust in risk regulation, compared to the more conventional aspects of trust. Based on the two independent trust factors that were found in this study, a typology of trust is proposed that ranges from full trust to a deep type of distrust. It is argued that for a functioning society it could well be more suitable to have critical but involved citizens in many situations.     

Uncertainty in functional principal component analysis

Principal component analysis (PCA) and functional principal analysis are key tools in multivariate analysis, in particular modelling yield curves, but little attention is given to questions of uncertainty, neither in the components themselves nor in any derived quantities such as scores. Actuaries using PCA to model yield curves to assess interest rate risk for insurance companies are required to show any uncertainty in their calculations. Asymptotic results based on assumptions of multivariate normality are unsatisfactory for modest samples, and application of bootstrap methods is not straightforward, with the novel pitfalls of possible inversions in order of sample components and reversals of signs. We present methods for overcoming these difficulties and discuss arising of other potential hazards.     

Ethnic discrimination in the Greek housing market

This study employs a field experiment to assess the degree of discrimination against female Albanians in Greek housing markets. We divide rental housing into three categories by rent and designate the different levels of rent as working, middle, and upper classes. Albanians are significantly less likely to be asked to visit advertised rental housing in all the three categories, while rental penalties for Albanians are also significant. Interestingly, more discrimination was observed with higher-status rental properties. The outcomes suggest that the existence of isolated and racially segregated housing may be a result of prejudice and/or negative stereotypes against Albanians.     

Part-Time Work and Women’s Careers: a Decomposition of the Gender Promotion Gap

This paper studies the effect of working hours on vertical sex segregation using Belgian micro-data on promotions. Using Yun decompositions we find that more than 40% of the promotion gaps between men and women can be explained by gender differences in contract hours, overtime hours and occasional late work. The fact that women often work in sectors that offer less promotion possibilities is another important factor. The presence of children strongly affects the promotion chances of female employees, but not those of the male employees in our sample. This evidence supports theories that relate the availability of part-time work to the degree of vertical segregation in countries.     

Moral wrongs,disadvantages, and disability: a critique of critical disability studies

Critical disability studies (CDS) has emerged as an approach to the study of disability over the last decade or so and has sought to present a challenge to the predominantly materialist line found in the more conventional disability studies approaches. In much the same way that the original development of the social model resulted in a necessary correction to the overly individualized accounts of disability that prevailed in much of the interpretive accounts which then dominated medical sociology, so too has CDS challenged the materialist line of disability studies. In this paper we review the ideas behind this development and analyse and critique some of its key ideas. The paper starts with a brief overview of the main theorists and approaches contained within CDS and then moves on to normative issues; namely, to the ethical and political applicability of CDS.     

Child well-being through different lenses: why concept matters

'Well-being' has entered policy rhetoric in children's services in the UK and other Western developed countries as a companion to other buzzwords of recent years. In order to improve children's well-being, we need not only a better understanding of what it is and how services can improve it, but also the ability to measure child well-being in order to evaluate success. This paper explores conceptually and empirically the 'lenses' through which child well-being is often viewed. It considers the relationships between these perspectives, the added value that each one brings and the implications for services.