ANES 1995 Pilot Study

Résumé 0

A number of pilot studies have been conducted by the National Election Studies (NES) for the purpose of developing new instrumentation. The 1995 Pilot Study is part of this effort, which also includes studies conducted in 1979, 1983, 1985, 1987, 1989, 1991, and 1993. As in earlier pilot studies (except for 1979), the 1995 study respondents were a subset of the previous year's traditional time-series respondents. The study is a one-wave reinterview of a randomly selected subset of respondents with telephones from the fresh cross-section portion of the AMERICAN NATIONAL ELECTION STUDY, 1994: POST-ELECTION SURVEY [ENHANCED WITH 1992 AND 1993 DATA] (ICPSR 6507). The 1995 Pilot Study was conducted between August 3 and September 10, 1995. The content of the study reflects the NES commitment to improve measures of candidate evaluation, the impact of the campaign, values and predispositions, the comparative study of elections, and other responses to a stimulus letter calling for ideas for content sent to the user community on November 4, 1994. Specific topic areas in the study include: (1) an experiment using different measures of affective reactions to political figures, (2) a module of items being concurrently tested in many other nations as part of a comparative study of politics, (3) a set of 12 items asking respondents to make tradeoffs among programs, taxes, and the budget deficit, (4) a set of items designed to measure attitudes toward the environment and environmental policy, (5) a new measure of "humanitarianism," and (6) an extensive set of items regarding attention to the media intended to capture exposure to the political campaigns. In order to include all of the content, and to test between competing instrumentation, there were two forms of the questionnaire. Rosters of items, such as the thermometer, were randomized in administration to minimize order effects.