An update to American Environics' previous Roadmap 2005, which contains a summary of how American values have evolved since 2004 and the results of the updated segmentation based upon the 2007 American Values Survey.



In 2005, American Environics created the first Road Map for a Progressive Majority, which used data from Environics' 3SC survey to map the social values of the American electorate to better understand the social values of the various "publics" in the United States.  At the time, American Environics was relatively new and the data used to create the initial roadmap was adapted from surveys primarily designed for commercial clients in the United States.

The Nathan Cummings Foundation provided seed funding in 2004 to create the first Road Map by adapting the existing Environics data set to create the initial segmentation of the U.S. population based upon its social values. The insights derived from the research in 2005 created a number of important insights to progressive organizations and groups attempting to advance a progressive agenda in a variety of public policy areas.  

The first Road Map provided detailed analysis of the progressive base, constituencies of opportunity, and methods to target both the base and the various swing constituencies. The study looked at the social values, demographics, issue positions, and media consumption habits of voters, and at the time represented the most comprehensive study of social values designed to help progressive organizations solve public policy problems.

By 2007, American Environics undertook the task of designing a new social values survey designed to cover a much larger number of social values related to public policy and social change. AE reduced the number of corporate and commercial social values and, working with social scientists, added a number of academically validated social values directly related to political decision making and attitudes on public policy issues. The result was a survey with more than 800 questions that tracks 130 social values constructs and attitudes on public policy issues from health care and immigration to nuclear proliferation and reproductive health. It also contains detailed questions on demographics, media consumption, and lifestyles. The American Values Survey is today the largest and most comprehensive research instrument available to progressive social change communities.

One of the primary goals of the survey was to create a new, more robust standard political segmentation system that can be used by a wide variety of progressive organizations to gain deep understandings as to the world views of key blocks of voters.

This update to the Road Map for a progressive Majority contains a summary of the new methodology used to gather data for the AVS, a brief summary of how social values have evolved since 2004, and the results of the updated segmentation based upon the 2007 American Values Survey.

Also Featured Inside:

-- Case Studies of Earthjustice, the Green Group Project, California Alliance, SCOPE, ACORN, the Herndon Alliance and more

-- Survey Methodology and American Values Survey Core Constructs explained

-- Evolution of American Social Values 2004 - 2007

-- The Political Values Segmentation System, and What it Means for Your Organization

-- America's 15 Distinct Psychographic Segments

Download the entire PDF here (1281 KB, November 2008)

The same kinds of social values that determine whether or not one subscribes to landline telephone service - social values our company tracks like Aversion to Complexity, Technology Anxiety, Tried and True - impacts their decisions as voters. Importantly for 2008 (and beyond), pollsters that treat landline and cell phone only voters the same are making less than accurate predictions.

Traditional public opinion polling has evolved over the years, but since the latter part of the 20th Century how those surveys are conducted hasn't changed all that much. To completely oversimplify, the process is pretty straightforward: get a representative sample of respondents on the telephone, design an instrument that asks good questions, weight the sample when appropriate and run the crosstabs.

While all of those steps are important to ensure accuracy, pollsters tightly hold their secret formulas for weighting samples. It's the industry's version of KFC's 13 original spices. Virtually all pollsters, however, when thinking about weighting do so by weighting a combination of demographic information or partisanship.

In the last few years changes in technology have complicated matters a bit for pollsters. The rise of the use of cell phones and caller ID have skewed the kinds of people that answer survey calls and agree to participate in the research. There has been a tremendous amount of debate in the pollster world, for example, about cell phones. For a long time, cell phones were excluded from most polling research. While many (if not most) pollsters now try to incorporate cell phone numbers into their research, the response rate is often different between landline and cell phone respondents.

Continue reading "Cell Phones, Landlines and the 2008 Election" »