Flutterby™! : Pew 2011-05-05 19:55:01.045559+00

Pew

2011-05-05 19:55:01.045559+00 by Dan Lyke 4 comments

I have tried, twice, to steel myself to take the Pew Research Center for People and the Press: Political Typology Quiz, but I just can't suck it up to answer the horrendously badly phrased questions. For instance:

STATEMENT ONE STATEMENT TWO

Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead these days Blacks who can't get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition

Uhhhh... "I don't like ice cream because I dislike strawberries" vs "peaches make yoghurt taste bad" anyone?

It's a matter of test design - not good or bad wording. Some questions you have to answer based on "which of these do I disagree with the least" rather than "which do I agree with the most".

The test is designed based on prior survey responses. It doesn't say "liberals always answer this way". Instead, it says "people who identify as liberals chose this answer statistically more often than the other answer".

#Comment I agree with Dan made: 2011-05-06 10:36:16.710868+00 by: spl

The statements either disregard a whole range of options or present options with unnecessary qualifications that assume too much. For an example of the latter, when choosing between "the government should do more to help needy Americans, even if it means going deeper into debt" and "the government today can't afford to do much more to help the needy," helping needy Americans doesn't equate to increasing debt, but these statements don't give that option. Some questions I don't even know how to answer: concerning "business corporations make too much profit" and "most corporations make a fair and reasonable amount of profit," I think corporations are going to make as much profit as they can, since that is their role after all. I have no problem with them making profit; I do have a problem when they do it at the expense of others, but this is a different question than deciding how much profit should corporations make.

The problem I ran into with the test was that I agreed or disagreed equally to some of the statements.

STATEMENT ONE	STATEMENT TWO
Racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can't get ahead these days	Blacks who can't get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition