ABSTRACT
Take a minute to think about your views on some prominent issues in contemporary American politics-healthcare, military intervention in the Middle East, affirmative action, or capital punishment, just to name a few. Whatever your views on these hotly contested issues, why do you suppose you have the attitudes that you do? As you have seen in the other chapters of this volume, scholars of public opinion typically attempt to answer questions like this by recruiting appropriate samples of the population and then preparing and administering carefully worded survey items that require respondents to “self-report” their attitudes, experiences, and inferences. For example, a survey respondent might report that he or she supports capital punishment and came to this opinion because of an influential parent or clergyperson.
