<http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=157464374>
A slightly left pragmatic. Sounds about right I think.
--------------
Ian Skinner
Web Programmer
BloodSource
www.BloodSource.org
Sacramento, CA
-----Original Message-----
From: Doug White [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 9:48 AM
To: CF-Community
Subject: Re: Interesting Political Opinions Survey
Way to the left of me at:
http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=1815460163
<http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=1815460163>
======================================
Stop spam on your domain, use our gateway!
http://www.clickdoug.com/mailfilter.cfm
<http://www.clickdoug.com/mailfilter.cfm>
For hosting solutions http://www.clickdoug.com <http://www.clickdoug.com>
Featuring Win2003 Enterprise, RedHat Linux, CFMX 6.1 and PHP
======================================
If you are not satisfied with my service, my job isn't done!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Larry C. Lyons" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "CF-Community" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, November 28, 2003 11:15 AM
Subject: Interesting Political Opinions Survey
| I think that this survey is much more valid than the other ones we've
tried.
|
| http://politics.beasts.org/ <http://politics.beasts.org/>
|
| FWIW, here are my scores:
| http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=838428544
<http://politics.beasts.org/scripts/results?surveyid=838428544>
|
| Axis Position
| 1 left/right -7.2199 (-0.4346)
| 2 pragmatism +2.2182 (+0.1335)
|
|
| Anyhow the following is part of the rationale of the survey given by
| its authors.
| --
| politicalcompass.org is a web site which asks a number of opinion
| questions of its visitors, and then places them in a two-dimensional
| space which is supposed to characterize their political views.
| Unfortunately, politicalcompass.org has a poor reputation; in
| particular, there is a suspicion that its questions are designed to
| make respondents lean towards an economically right-wing, socially
| liberal ("right libertarian") position, and the two axes of variation
| on which results are plotted are opaque in their derivation and may
| not be tremendously relevant.
|
| These suspicions are compounded by the problem that
| politicalcompass.org's methods are not open and, therefore, it is not
| possible to determine whether their selection of questions carries a
| bias which its operators are using to further their own ends.
|
| The purpose of this site is to do a survey of this type properly and
| openly, so that the methods and data in use are open to inspection.
| More detail
|
| The proper way to do this is to collect a bunch of questions and a
| bunch of answers to them, then take the space defined by all the
| answers to the questions, and construct a spanning basis for it. The
| natural way to do this is with principal components analysis, though
| as a non-statistician I can't comment on whether this is actually the
| best approach. We should then be able to discover -- in terms defined
| by the answers to the questions set -- the significant axes of
| variation in the data.
|
| This means that all the results we get are defined by the data: we do
| not measure anyone's views according to criteria we set out, but
| according to endogenous criteria. The only points at which our
| judgment enters the method are
|
| * when choosing questions (or, rather propositions); and
| * when we give context to the results.
|
| The first of those shouldn't matter, if the questions are reasonably
| unbiased and cover a wide enough range of subject materials. The
| second doesn't matter, since it's just a presentational issue.
| --
|
| So far I'm going over their analysis, and looking at how they did the
| factor analysis, it looks pretty good so far. I'm going download
| their data over the weekend and run it through a few of my stats
| programs (SPSS for the factor analysis and AMOS for the causal
| modelling/path analysis) and see if it holds. but my first impression
| by looking at their published eigenvectors, is that it looks legit.
|
| larry
|
_____
[Todays Threads] [This Message] [Subscription] [Fast Unsubscribe] [User Settings]
