Making Smoking Sexy

Making Smoking Sexy

Sunday, September 19, 2010

Taking a Look at Nonattitudes and Insincerity

In my Public Opinion class we have been discussing two issues that affect the accuracy of polls and those issues are Nonattitudes and Insincerity. Nonattitdues are when people who don't have an opinion on a topic answer as though they do. For example, when it comes to my topic if a person who didn't have any opinion on health care reform but answered saying they were in favor of it, that would be a nonattitude. I am not thinking that nonattitudes is something that is going to be a very big problem in my issue. Even if people are uninformed or misinformed people have opinions on health care and health care reform. Something that might cause a problem however is insincerity. Insincerity is when a person has an opinion about a topic, but gives a different opinion. For example, with my topic if I asked a person if they approved of Obama's health care bill and they said yes even though they did not then that is insincerity. This could be a problem because health care is very controversial and people might lie to protect their image so they do not come off as cold or uncaring. People might have the opinion that it is not their problem if others are not insured, but do not express this opinion because it might show them in a negative light.  Also healthcare seems to be something that is very political. For example (and this is not always true) people who consider themselves Republican tend to be against healthcare reform (or at least Obama's plan) and people who consider themselves Democratic tend to be in favor of serious healthcare reform. This might cause people who have differing opinions from their political party to lie so they don't go against their parties view. I am not sure if the polls that I have seen so far actually have problems with insincerity but I did notice a difference in the amount of people who believe that the United States health care system has serious problems and the amount of people who support Obama's health care reform plan. Many more people agreed that their were serious problems in the system, yet not as many supported Obama's plan. Do you think that this might be an example of insincerity? I'm not sure but it is a problem that needs to be looked at when addressing polls.

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