Gary Langer

Langer Research Associates

A summary of social, behavioral and economic survey research on COVID-19 released in the past week, as compiled for the Societal Experts Action Network (SEAN). Most surveys cited in this report are available in the SEAN COVID-19 Survey Archive.

This paper presents state-level estimates of the 2016 presidential election using data from the ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll and multilevel regression with poststratification (MRP). While previous implementations of MRP for election forecasting have relied on data from prior elections to establish poststratification targets for the compos...

Objectives The National Sleep Foundation (NSF) sought to test, refine, and add statistical rigor to its previously described provisional Sleep Satisfaction Tool (SST). The tool assesses the general population's sleep satisfaction. Design In 2017, NSF created a provisional tool through systematic literature review and an expert consensus panel proc...

The rise of alternative research methodologies has occurred, in many instances, without due regard to the theoretical and empirical evaluations required to ascertain the validity and reliability of the data produced. This chapter explores the historical development of probability-based survey research, the use of increasingly popular non-probabilit...

Understanding how well a sample of respondents represents the larger population from which is was drawn is critical to being able to generate valid inferences about the population. Probability-based sampling approaches have been a theoretical and empirical cornerstone of high-quality research about populations. However, non-probability sampling met...

Objectives: A validated survey instrument to assess general sleep health would be a useful research tool, particularly when objective measures of sleep are not feasible. Thus, the National Sleep Foundation spearheaded the development of the Sleep Health Index (SHI). Design: The development of the SHI began with a task force of experts who identi...

A first-of-its-kind patient survey, Medication Adherence in America: A National Report Card, finds that Americans 40 and older with a chronic medical condition earn a troubling C+ on average and that one in seven members of this group received an F when it comes to taking their medications correctly. The report card calculated grades based on an a...

Survey researchers commonly use RDD (random digit dialing) samples that are purged of listed business telephone numbers to increase interviewer productivity by removing numbers that are assumed to be ineligible for household surveys. This study investigates this practice and finds an unintended consequence: an increase in household noncoverage. The...

Accurately assessing the number of household phone lines in random-digit dialed (RDD) surveys for use in weighting has become more complicated over time. This study evaluates phone line weighting by asking an in-depth battery of seven questions designed to measure the number of available land lines in the home more precisely. The results show that...

During the last decade, a great deal of news media attention has focused on informing the American public about scientific findings on global warming (GW). Has learning this sort of information led the American public to become more concerned about GW? Using data from two surveys of nationally representative samples of American adults, this article...

Efforts to measure voter preferences and attitudes in the quadrennial U.S. presidential elections extend across the months-long campaign, starting well before the initial state-level primaries used to pick each party’s nominees and continuing through the parties’ political conventions and, later, the debates held between the major candidates. ABC N...

Unlabelled: Little is known about how people with pain seek relief. To estimate the proportion of the population reporting recent pain, to identify ways people seek pain relief, and to report the perceived effectiveness of pain relief methods, we conducted a secondary analysis of results from a nationwide survey of the general U.S. population. Of...

When measuring attitudes with questions that offer dichotomous, mutually exclusive response options, researchers can ask “fully balanced” questions (which fully state both competing points of view) or “minimally balanced” questions (which fully state one viewpoint and only briefly acknowledge the second viewpoint). The two studies reported here inv...

A poorly devised exit poll question undermined meaningful analysis of voters’ concerns in the 2004 presidential election. Twenty-two percent of voters picked “moral values” from a list of “issues” describing what mattered most in their vote, more than selected any other item. Various commentators have misinterpreted this single data point to conclu...