The Context of Public Opinion: How our Belief Systems can Affect Poll Results

Lester W. Milbrath

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1984, vol. 472, issue 1, 35-49

Abstract: Public opinion is embedded in underlying societal beliefs—a social paradigm—and these organize the way that people perceive and interpret the functioning of the world around them. Paradigms are so fundamental as to be taken for granted, but they do change. Evidence is presented that modern industrial societies now are undergoing a paradigm shift; substantial proportions of the public are now operating on the basis of one or more new paradigms. Public opinion analysts no longer can take for granted the belief paradigm that had been our context for opinion. Instead they must investigate paradigms and take them into account in the design and analysis of opinion studies.

Date: 1984
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716284472001004 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:472:y:1984:i:1:p:35-49

DOI: 10.1177/0002716284472001004

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().