Another Gallup poll

[Eugene Volokh]

    Interestingly, a Gallup poll in January 1987 reached a somewhat
different result.  The pollsters gave people a card which said

    "This card lists various groups of people.  Would you please sort
    out any that you would NOT like to have as nieghbors."

    The results were:

    "Unmarried single people living together        12%
     Hispanics                                       9%
     Members of minority religious sects or cults   44%
     Religious fundamentalists                      13%
     Blacks                                         13%
     Catholics                                       1%
     Jews                                            3%
     Protestants                                     2%
     Don't Know                                     29%
     None/All are OK (volunteered response)         12%"
    [Source:  Public Opinion Online, accession number 0044681,
    question number 032.  National audit, 1562 participants, personal
    interviews.]

    By comparison, the January 1989 Gallup poll asked "Which of the
following groups of people would you like or dislike having as
neighbors?"  The answers were

                        Would       Would       Not
                        Welcome     Not         Sure
    Catholics           94%          3%          3%
    Protestants         92%          5%          3%
    Jews                91%          5%          4%
    Blacks              83%         12%          5%
    Koreans             79%         14%          7%
    Hispanics           78%         16%          6%
    Indians, Pakistanis 78%         15%          7%
    Vietnamese          75%         18%          7%
    Russians            74%         19%          7%
      [my very own!]
    Unmarried couples   71%         23%          6%
    Religious fundamentalists
                        58%         30%         12%
    Religious sects, cults
                        31%         62%          7%
    [Source:  Nat'l J., Mar. 25, 1989, at 762; Public Opinion Online,
    accession number 0025788, question number 011.  National audit,
    1001 participants, telephone interviews.]

    The mystery, of course, is:  Why the difference?  The two-year
gap doesn't seem to explain things, especially since the 1989 results
show considerably more hostility towards religious fundamentalists
AND members of minority religious sects or cults AND unmarried
couples.  Possibly there's some difference in the two question forms,
but which one measures people's sentiments most accurately (or are
the sentiments fixed enough that you can measure them accurately)?
Or was there something in the questions that we don't see from these
reports?  Or perhaps (not implausible) people are more reluctant to
confess bias in personal interviews than in a telephone audit.

    My tentative guess:

    1)  It's hard to determine whether the level of hostility to
religious fundamentalists is better captured by the 13% number or the
30% number.  I'd probably lean towards the 30%, though, because it
strikes me that telephone surveys are better at capturing this
information than personal surveys.  Does that make sense?  (Note
also that if this theory is true, then it tells us something quite
significant about the general weaknesses of personal surveys.)

    2)  At the same time, it's noteworthy that both polls show at
least as much stated hostility towards religious fundamentalists as
towards blacks, more stated hostility than towards Hispanics, and
much more than towards Jews.

    3)  It is of course also hard to determine what the true levels of
hostility are from this -- people might have different willingness to
self-report hostility towards blacks than towards religious
fundamentalist.  On the other hand, the difference in willingness to
confess to hostility would itself be rather telling.

    Rick:  I believe you were quoting from a whole book describing
the Jan 1989 Gallup poll -- what do they say (if anything) about the
1987 poll?

                               -- Eugene Volokh, UCLA Law