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Public Opinion Quarterly 44:198-209 (1980)
© 1980 American Association for Public Opinion Research
Pseudo-Opinions on Public Affairs
George F. Bishop is a Senior Research Associate, Robert W. Oldendick is a Research Associate, and Alfred J. Tuchfarber is Director, Behavioral Sciences Laboratory at the University of Cincinnati. Stephen E. Bennett is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Cincinnati. The research reported here was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SOC78-07407). The authors want to thank Howard Schuman and Stanley Presser for their comments on a presentation of a previous version of this paper at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Buck Hill Falls, Pennsylvania, June 1979.
This article reports on the often suspected but rarely researched tendency of survey respondents to give opinions on topics to which they have given little or no thought. The findings, based on a question about a fictitious public affairs issue, do show that the magnitude of the problem is substantial. But the data also demonstrate that this phenomenon does not represent simple random error, reflecting instead basic social-psychological dispositions which can be elicited, unwittingly, in the context of the interview.
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