Social scientists, for various purposes are interested in measuring the collective opinions of a society involving a range of issues, often in order to make policy recommendations and to predict the outcomes of elections and referendums. The most prominent technique for discovering the public opinion is the sample survey, where a subset of individuals are selected to give their personal opinions which are then aggregated into a public collective. My guest this episode is Dr. Esra Burak Ho, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. Esra works in the fields of income inequality, distributive justice, executive compensation, and attitudes. Her current work examines attitudes toward executive compensation in the U.S., Hong Kong, and mainland China. She primarily uses population based survey experiments in her research. In this episode she tells us about some of the challenges in using sample surveys to collect public opinion and some of the clever ways social scientists overcome those challenges. You can learn more about Esra's work on her website www.esraburak.com
Learn More:
- Esra Burak - The Social Maximum: American Attitudes toward Extremely High Incomes
- Philip E. Converse - The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics
- Sheldon R. Gawiser and G. Evans Witt - 20 Questions A Journalist Should Ask About Poll Results
- Andrew J. Perrin and Katherine McFarland - Social Theory and Public Opinion
- Roger Tourangeau, Lance J. Rips, and Kenneth Rasinski - The Psychology of Survey Response