Thought you might be interested in this, from MSN:

Warren

 

Interesting, the average American male essentially has no opinion about the following things:

4. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "very conservative" and 10 is "very liberal," how would you rate your political view.

Northeast - 5.5

West - 5.2

Midwest - 4.9

South - 4.9

Average - 5.1

5. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "strongly disagree" and 10 is strongly agree," what's your opinion about the following statement: "America has peaked as a global power."

1, 2, or 3 - 26%

4 or 5 - 27%

6 or 7 - 22%

8,9, or 10 - 25%

Average: 5.4

6. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is "very pessimistic" and 10 is very optimistic," how would you rate your outlook on the following issues?

The U.S. economy - 5.5

The degree to which American are protected from terrorism - 5.3

The degree to which Americans' privacy rights are protected - 4.9

The war in Iraq - 4.6

The U.S. becoming less dependent on foreign oil - 4.4

With an average of ~5 (or middle of the road, i.e. no opinion), it seems that the respondents couldn't even answer the questions with any definitive opinions. I am not surprised.

 

I wonder.... is it a survey of the Americian male? Or a survey of the Americian male that reads Esquire?

 

happs, you're trying to draw a conclusion that isn't there. Why?

#4- We have a two party system, as this is not a nation of extremests. What would you expect?

#5- Just as many people had extreme yes or no opinions as those who
were in the middle...

#6- Are you extremely optomistic or pessimistic about any of those questions? Do you know something no one else does?

A middle road opinion does not equate to apathy or ambiguity as much as it does balance.

 

What I was refering to is the inherant problem with using a survey that allows for a middle score. The general population will always trend towards the center, so a scale of 1-10 will almost always have an average score of ~5. The survey is just about useless. They should have made people chose a side, maybe using a scale of 1-4 instead.

I'd also be interested in seeing the raw data.

Finally, I'm usually skeptical of anything printed in Esquire. . . I read GQ.

 

Heh, it's like surveying two people about weight - one is obese, the other anorexic. Conclusion - on average, Americans are at the proper weight.

 

+1

 

WHHHAATTT!!!!! Esquire kicks GQ's ass!

 

It was an independant poll of American males by a professional polling company, not a reader survey. Esquire paid for the survey and printed it; they didn't conduct the survey themselves.

This doesn't mean that most American men are middle of the road or have no opinion, although it could. It could also be that equal numbers of American men see themselves as liberal and conservative - if half of the men answered "1" and half answered "10", you'd still get an average of "5".

-Bob

 

your analysis came to a completely unsupported conclusion. While I understand your logic, and while you may be correct, you're simply missing the information needed to draw it from the results you've stated here.

When you see a question's mean response, it only means there is either a relatively equal distribution of respondent ratings. Everyone picked 4 or 5 or an equal numb er of people picked 1 and 10.

For the global power question over 51% had strong opinions while 49% had middle of the road opinions.

a score of <>.5 (on a 1 to 10 scale) from the middle often indicates something statistically significant, however, without sample sizes it would be pretty hard to determine that.

Basically this study has proven nothing relevant because they didn't publish the bucket stats. how many picked 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. Now if you did a demographic/attitudinal segmentation on this data set you'd probably get some interesting and meaningful information. Good luck getting that, most of these crap stat houses only do ATU type studies and lack any reasonable advanced methodologies to draw those meaningful conclusions.

Yet another worthless study.