HotAirPrimarySurvey:JuneEdition posted

Hot Air Primary Survey: June Edition

posted at 8:31 am on June 11, 2014 by Patrick Ishmael

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It’s that time again. Thanks for participating!

Tags: 2016 election, Republican nomination, survey

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Hot Air survey results: Presidential primary candidate and issue testing

HotAirsurveyresults:Presidentialprimarycandidateand

Surprise:NewCensusBureauchangestoannualsurvey

Surprise: New Census Bureau changes to annual survey will obscure effects of ObamaCare

posted at 12:01 pm on April 15, 2014 by Allahpundit

Seems legit. It’s a basic principle of science that when you’re running an experiment on a control group and a group subjected to your new drug, you want to use totally different methodologies in measuring the effects on each to see if the drug is working.

As it turns out, the change the Bureau is making all but guarantees that the number of uninsured next year, post-ObamaCare, will be lower than than the number last year, pre-ObamaCare. This drug will work, even if the feds have to tweak how success is measured to ensure it.

An internal Census Bureau document said that the new questionnaire included a “total revision to health insurance questions” and, in a test last year, produced lower estimates of the uninsured. Thus, officials said, it will be difficult to say how much of any change is attributable to the Affordable Care Act and how much to the use of a new survey instrument.

“We are expecting much lower numbers just because of the questions and how they are asked,” said Brett J. O’Hara, chief of the health statistics branch at the Census Bureau…

Another Census Bureau paper said “it is coincidental and unfortunate timing” that the survey was overhauled just before major provisions of the health care law took effect. “Ideally,” it said, “the redesign would have had at least a few years to gather base line and trend data.”

The old questionnaire asked consumers if they had various types of coverage at any time in the prior year. The new survey asks if they have insurance at the time of the interview — in February, March or April — then uses follow-up questions to find out when that coverage began and what months it was in effect. Using this technique, census officials believe they will be able to reconstruct the history of coverage month by month, over a period of about 15 months, for each person in a household.

They’ve been asking people whether they’ve had any health insurance over the past year. Supposedly, that produces a lot of false negatives from lower-income people who’ve forgotten that they were on Medicaid for a time before leaving the rolls. By changing the questions and following up later, they’re going to try to help people remember better by reconstructing a timeline with them for the past 12 months. All of which is fine — but why do it now? Logically, in the interest of preserving a clear comparison of America before and after a massive overhaul of the health-insurance industry, you’d want to hold all variables in a survey like this constant between 2013 and 2014. Unless, that is, the goal here is producing rosier numbers by any means necessary.

Even some liberal wonks are annoyed by the move. If you have faith in O-Care and think the numbers of uninsured will be rosier next year on the merits, the last thing you want is the Census Bureau handing critics a reason to doubt the data:

Just from a research perspective, this feels like a *terrible* time to change how we count who has health insurance. http://t.co/pzUePFfBQD

— Sarah Kliff (@sarahkliff) April 15, 2014

It's insane for Census to change its method for measuring health insurance coverage right now. Why can't this wait? http://t.co/4RU0tlKNFd

— Josh Barro (@jbarro) April 15, 2014

Go figure that an administration that would ignore statutory deadlines and treat people with unpaid premiums as fully enrolled in the name of making its signature boondoggle look better would also play games with the Census. Exit question: Remember in 2009 when Obama ordered the director of the Census Bureau to “work directly with the White House”?

Tags: census, coverage, obama, ObamaCare, premiums, survey, uninsured

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Survey:65%ofBrazilianswhollyorpartiallyagree

Survey: 65% of Brazilians wholly or partially agree that raping women in revealing clothing is justified

posted at 5:21 pm on March 31, 2014 by Allahpundit

Nearly as shocking as the topline result is the sample. Fully two-thirds of the respondents were women.

Brazilian newspaper Folha de S. Paulo reported a survey released this week by the government’s Institute of Applied Economic Research (IPEA), found that most Brazilian – about 65 – percent agree that it is justified to rape women “wearing clothes showing their bodies.”

About 58 percent of respondents also agreed that “if women knew how to behave, there would be fewer rapes.”…

The study also showed that 91 percent of Brazilians agree that “a man beating his wife has to go to jail” while 82 percent disagree with the statement that “a woman who gets beaten at home should be quiet to not harm the children.”

Folha de S. Paulo reported that the study concluded that in regards to sexual violence, “most people still consider women as responsible for the behavior due to wearing of provocative clothing or ‘inappropriate’ behavior” and yet they believe physical violence is not tolerated.

Like most Americans, my knowledge of Brazil consists mainly of Carnival, beaches, and a hot climate (and soccer, of course). I assumed showing your body was just part of the dress code for both sexes.

Here’s the poll data for those who can read Portuguese. The excerpt is misleading in one respect: Apparently, the 65 percent figure includes people who “partially” believe that rape is justified depending upon what a woman’s hearing. What that means precisely, I have no idea. (Also no idea: How much or little clothing constitutes provocativeness.) Maybe they think rapists deserve to be prosecuted but that the victims share moral blame if they’re showing off? In that case, do the people who “wholly” believe rape is justified in those circumstances think rapists should … walk scot free? I don’t get the distinction either between physical violence, which is a fairly strict no-no in the poll, and sexual violence. What do these people imagine goes on during rape? What am I missing here?

Lest you think English-language media is distorting the results of the survey, there was sufficient outrage at the poll in Brazil itself to kickstart a social-media campaign. Result: Many more photos on Twitter and Facebook of Brazilian women taking it all off to prove a point.

Tags: Brazil, justified, poll, rape, survey, women

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WorldwidepollofCatholicsshows…alot

Worldwide poll of Catholics shows … a lot of confusion

posted at 4:01 pm on February 10, 2014 by Ed Morrissey

Not the least of which is on the part of the poll itself. Yesterday, the Washington Post’s religion reporters Michelle Boorstein and Peyton Craighill reported on a global survey conducted by Univision that showed a wide split among Catholics of different regions on adherence to church doctrine. Boorstein and Craighill argue that this demonstrates the uphill battle facing Pope Francis as he tries to unite the global Christian church, and his own:

Most Catholics worldwide disagree with church teachings on divorce, abortion and contraception and are split on whether women and married men should become priests, according to a large new poll released Sunday and commissioned by the U.S. Spanish-language network Univision. On the topic of gay marriage, two-thirds of Catholics polled agree with church leaders.

Overall, however, the poll of more than 12,000 Catholics in 12 countries reveals a church dramatically divided: Between the developing world in Africa and Asia, which hews closely to doctrine on these issues, and Western countries in Europe, North America and parts of Latin America, which strongly support practices that the church teaches are immoral.

The widespread disagreement with Catholic doctrine on abortion and contraception and the hemispheric chasm lay bare the challenge for Pope Francis’s year-old papacy and the unity it has engendered.

Among the findings:

●19 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 30 percent in the Latin American countries surveyed agree with church teaching that divorcees who remarry outside the church should not receive Communion, compared with 75 percent in the most Catholic African countries.

●30 percent of Catholics in the European countries and 36 percent in the United States agree with the church ban on female priests, compared with 80 percent in Africa and 76 percent in the Philippines, the country with the largest Catholic population in Asia.

●40 percent of Catholics in the United States oppose gay marriage, compared with 99 percent in Africa.

The poll, which was done by Bendixen & Amandi International for Univision, did not include Catholics everywhere. It focused on 12 countries across the continents with some of the world’s largest Catholic populations. The countries are home to more than six of 10 Catholics globally.

Some of this, though, depends on definitions. Let’s look at the question asked on abortion, for instance, to understand the limitations of the results:

Do you think that abortions should be allowed in all cases, allowed in some cases for example when the life of the mother is in danger, or should it not be allowed at all?

That framing of the question is deeply deceptive, especially in the US and Europe. Most abortions in both places have nothing to do with the physical health of the mother; they are almost entirely elective, chosen for convenience. Even according to the abortion-friendly Guttmacher Institute, 74% of those choosing abortions cite convenience as a reason (non-exclusively), 48% cite economic issues, and 25% say they just don’t want people to know they’re pregnant. Only 12% mention their own health at all, let alone claim their lives are at risk. The most common answers in combination never even mention it. That framing does not deal with the reality of the abortion debate nor of the Catholic issues regarding it.

Even so, the striking figure here is the low number of Catholics who think abortion should be unrestricted. If, as the question suggests, abortion was restricted to only issues of the mother’s health and rape and incest, there may be considerable support for having just those limited options available as compared to the abortion-on-demand environment which currently dominates the US. Only 10% of American Catholics, and 20% of those in Europe, favor abortion on demand. That’s a little more positive than the poll’s top-line results and analysis indicate.

On the rest of the questions save one, the results show the challenge for Francis not so much on unity as for catechesis. The issue in the West seems to be a lack of education on Catholic teaching on issues such as contraception, marriage and the role of sexual expression in God’s plan, and the nature of the priesthood. The only issue that doesn’t relate to doctrine is whether priests should be married, which is a practice rather than a doctrine, and one limited to the Latin Rite (which is by far the Catholic Church’s largest). Interestingly, it’s also the one where considerable loyalty remains to the Church teaching, even in the West, although still a minority position.

The poll shows that Western Catholics want the church to allow divorced-and-remarried members to receive Communion. Recent comments by Francis about finding ways to minister to those in broken families sounded to some as though the Vatican would rethink doctrine on remarriage and adultery, but those comments were in the context of children from those marriages. John Allen and Lisa Wangsness asked Cardinal Sean O’Malley about the prospects for rewriting doctrine on these points, and the Boston prelate puts them at nil:

But he cautions that those with high expectations that the shift in tone presages major changes in church teachings on contraception, abortion, homosexuality, and other flashpoint issues are likely to be disappointed.

“I don’t see the pope as changing doctrine,’’ O’Malley said in an interview with the Globe, though he said the pontiff’s focus on compassion and mercy over doctrinal purity has reverberated powerfully throughout the church.

The Roman Catholic archbishop of Boston and the closest American adviser to the popular new pontiff, O’Malley said says it would also be unrealistic to expect the church to consider allowing divorced and remarried Catholics to receive the sacraments, even though Francis himself once appeared to signal openness to the idea.

“The church needs to be faithful to the Gospel and to Christ’s teaching,” O’Malley said. “Sometimes that’s very difficult. We have to follow what Christ wants, and trust that what he asks of us is the best thing.”

The Vatican is gathering input on the issues highlighted by the poll, O’Malley tells Allen and Wangsness, but to find ways to improve education on doctrine, not to change doctrine to satisfy public sentiment:

O’Malley acknowledged that the church’s teachings on social issues are unpopular in contemporary Western societies. But he said the church cannot change its views to suit the times. Instead, he said, it must find new ways of explaining its teachings to a culture dominated by secular humanist values.

“The church has always tried to explain the faith,” he said.

Clearly, we need to explain it better, especially in the West.

Tags: abortion, Catholic Church, Catholicism, polls, Pope Francis, Sean O'Malley, survey

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