|
|
 |
Why do we believe what we believe?
For 150 years, philosophers, social scientists, and corporate marketers alike have asked this question. Over that time, researchers have become increasingly sophisticated at identifying the largely unconscious and irrational drivers of our personal, consumer, and political decision-making. And yet, for the most part, progressive social change strategists have been asking a different question – What do people believe? – without ever asking the equally important follow-up question: "Why?"
Without exploring why people believe what they believe, progressives often develop superficial communications strategies aimed at "educating the public" about the facts-without ever considering whether those facts meet the very real psychological needs and values that drive political opinions and behavior.
Since 1992, Canadian marketing research firm Environics has been conducting a longitudinal survey of social values in the United States. In 2004, American Environics (AE) was founded to make this research available to social change strategists and philanthropists in the United States. In 2007, American Environics added several important new constructs to its survey, making the American Values Survey the most sophisticated social values, political psychology, and psychographic targeting tool of its kind.
Survey Methodology
The American Values Survey (AVS) is one of the last major in-home social values surveys conducted in the United States. With roughly 500 independent questionnaire items, the survey takes roughly 90 to 120 minutes to take. AE uses a "placed mail" methodology, which is increasingly being used by the U.S. Census. This large survey assures a representative sample of the U.S. population, including voters and nonvoters, citizens and noncitizens, ages 15 and older. One of the benefits of an anonymous, in-home survey is that people can fill out the questionnaire in the privacy of their own homes. We thus avoid what social scientists call the "social desirability bias"-the tendency of respondents to tell interviewers what they believe they want to hear rather than what they honestly believe.
With 1,700 respondents, our survey is also larger than what one typically finds in a segmentation of key constituencies. In addition, to ensure accurate representation to U.S. Census data, we conduct the survey over several weeks, not a few days. This allows our team of sampling analysts to continually monitor the fielding effort and redirect respondent recruitment to compensate for any gaps in key geodemographic segments.
Many of the questions in our survey build on existing items from multiple sources, from established academic indexes to the National Election Survey and the General Social Survey. And almost of all of the values constructs on the AVS are comprised of multiple questionnaire items.
Since 2006, AE has been using the AVS to conduct focus groups with psychographic segments, resulting in a high degree of values coherence among focus group participants.
American Values Survey: Core Constructs, 1992 - ongoing
What follows is a partial list of the social values, mental postures, and mindsets that the AVS tracks.
- Demographics-plus. The AVS collects information on age, sex, gender, race, income, education, parenthood, sexual orientation, homeownership, car ownership, and many other factors.
- Politics. We have several batteries on ideological identification and party identification, as well as preferences for the 2008 presidential primary candidates.
- Membership organizations. The AVS has a battery querying involvement and attitudes toward a range of political, civic, and membership organizations on the left, right, center, and apolitical, from MoveOn and the Sierra Club to Focus on the Family and the NRA.
- Personality. For the first time in 2007, we have added the standard battery of questions from what is known as "the big five" theory of personality, which identifies personality along five dimensions: openness to new experiences, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness. This will allow us to track the relationship between political attitudes, social values, and personality, and identify opportunities to appeal to the public's more generous and open sides.
- Religion. The AVS draws on the latest research in religious attitudes toward God, the afterlife, evolution, and national religious leaders, and measures things like church attendance and emerging forms of spirituality.
- Work. As societies move from agrarian to industrial to postindustrial and knowledge-based, attitudes toward work change dramatically. Increasingly, highly educated Americans want work that is not only well paying and high status but also that increases their skills, affords them new experiences and opportunities, and allows for greater personal creativity and self-expression. But other Americans still think "a job's a job," and that it should be evaluated more narrowly according to how much it pays, the benefits, and work hours. Who holds which attitudes, and how do they correlate with other values and opinions? How can various attitudes be tapped for communications and policy initiatives?
- Aspiration. In America, it's not enough to know who people are-we need to know who they aspire to become. We thus ask a range of questions about aspirations toward social mobility, consumer products, and places to live.
- Science and Technology. In the industrial age, Americans increasingly turned to science as a guide for what to believe and how to live. But in our transition to a postindustrial economy, there is increasing skepticism toward scientific authorities, including medical authority, even (and sometimes especially) among highly educated Americans. It is routinely pointed out that most Americans do not believe in the Darwinian view of evolution-but this should not be read as a rejection of science whole cloth. The AVS offers a way to understand how these complex attitudes toward science, and the fears and excitement about technology, correlate to other social and political attitudes.
- Violence and Social Darwinism. "Violence can sometimes be exciting." This is one of the question items we track for the value Acceptance of Violence, which is the fastest growing value today in the United States.
- Media and Consumption. In addition to tracking values, we also track what media Americans consume, from cable television to podcasts to magazines to Internet and gaming. And we track consumption patterns and preferences on everything from technology products to travel to automotive and financial products.
- Issues. We have long tracked issues ranging from taxation, the death penalty, criminal justice, illicit drugs, education, childrearing, immigration, abortion, foreign policy, health care, and the environment, and in 2007 we added many new questions to these batteries.
- Race and Class. Measuring attitudes on race and class are notoriously difficult. Survey respondents are often loath to express their true feelings around race and class. We have borrowed from recent sociological research techniques to elicit attitudes around race, class, and prejudice that are designed to avoid strong negative reactions while still soliciting useful attitudes. We also track attitudes around social hierarchy, social dominance, and status.
- Sexuality and Gender. Between 1992 and 2004, the percentage of Americans who agreed with the statement "The father of the family must be the master in his own house" went from 42 to 52 percent. But, at the same time, the percentage who agreed that "Taking care of the home and kids is as much a man's work as women's work" rose from 86 percent in 1992 to 89 percent in 2004. How can this be? The answer may be that people hold different attitudes around gender roles and gender equality depending on the social domain (home vs. the workplace) in question, or that the definition of "master" itself has changed.
The AVS tracks distinct values trends relating to gender, including Patriarchy, Sexism, Flexible Gender Identity, Flexible Family, Gender Parity, Traditional Family, Traditional Gender Identity, and Reverse Sexism. Just because an individual takes a progressive position on one value doesn't mean she holds a similar position on the other. We also have question batteries around premarital sex, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, and an experimental battery on "masculine overcompensation."
- Civic Engagement, Trust, and Belonging. America has long been a country of strong civic associations, but Americans today are seeking more ways of creating community and affiliation than ever before. Associations that were typical in the industrial economy-from the mainline church to the union hall to the bowling league have been in decline for 30 years. But their decline has been accompanied by the rise of new forms of belonging, from evangelical megachurches to virtual gaming communities to flexible postindustrial workplaces. The AVS tracks everything from social alienation to loneliness to civic engagement, and AE helps groups create social change strategies that tap into these new forms of belonging and the values animating them. And we track trust. Do you trust government, corporations, celebrities? What motivates this trust, and what are its implications?
|
|
|
