Hampton Roads Still Conservative
By Andrew Schwartz | Thursday, September 29th, 2011 | Catch-AllA recent survey from the Social Science Research Center at Old Dominion University found that those in the Hampton Roads area who identify themselves as having a conservative ideology still dominate the political spectrum. In this survey completed by 681 adults, 37.9% identified as conservative, 33% as moderates, and 25.3% as liberal.
This remains largely unchanged since 2010, as most deviations are within the presumable standard of error (though none was given in the official report).
It must be noted that the question asked respondents to identify themselves as “extremely liberal, liberal, somewhat liberal, moderate or middle of the road, somewhat conservative, conservative, or extremely conservative” (no rotation of responses indicated); however in their analysis they reduced the responses to simply “liberal, moderate, and conservative.”
Had ODU provided cross-tabs or even question/response tables, I could have done a proper quantitative analysis. But they didn’t even provide a confidence interval or a margin of error.
Oh, and they spelled “Seventy-four” wrong…
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About the author
Andrew Schwartz is a historian from Old Dominion University, where, despite his conservative arguments in liberal academia, he graduated Summa Cum Laude. His focus as a historian is on Colonial and Revolutionary American political, legal and intellectual history. His focus on politics is rational conservatism. He can also be found at AmericanThinker.com.
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2 Responses to "Hampton Roads Still Conservative"
Without bothering to use my calculator, I can guess that a sample size of 681 out of the population of Hampton Roads would have a margin of error of something north of 5%. No wonder they didn’t publish it. At the extreme end of the MOE, that would make Hampton Roads equal to the nation-wide norms. And, anyone who would attempt to normalize a population as politically diverse as Newport News, Portsmouth, Norfolk, and Virginia Beach is a fraud. To demonstrate, I like to use the example of one of my early statistics classes: if 51% of Americans are male and 49% are female, then the average American is a hermaphrodite.
I sincerely hope that no taxpayer money went into this “survey.”
I believe the definitions of the three are extremely broad. What is a Conservative? …a Liberal?
HisRoc,
No, your kids tuition paid for it.
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