Module overview
Public opinion matters to governments, to political parties, to pressure groups, to pollsters, and to academics in political science as well as many other areas. It is also interesting. People are more diverse, unpredictable and hard to understand than political parties, trade laws, electoral systems, and so on, and the fickle and elusive nature of public attitudes makes them a challenging but rewarding thing to study.
This module is about how we find out what the public think – about policies, priorities, party leaders, even about each other. Since the sample survey is overwhelmingly the dominant method of measuring public opinion, understanding how to conduct surveys and polls is the basis of the module. It will make it easier to understand the material in other modules that draw on survey data, expand the scope of your Masters dissertation (and potentially future doctoral work), and provide skills of use to more or less the full range of employers.
Measuring public opinion is a three-step process. First, drawing on the previous module in Political Psychology & Electoral Behaviour, we review the concept of public opinion and the question of whether people care and know enough about politics actually to have opinions and to be able to answer survey questions. The second step is to collect the data. We follow the stages of designing and conducting a survey: writing a questionnaire, deciding who should receive it and how, and fielding the survey. Third, we have to process, clean and analyse those data.