“Who Guesses? Estimating Counterfactual Confidence Levels to Understand Differences in Opinion Expression,” Matthew Graham, Yale University

ISPS EXPERIMENTS WORKSHOP

Abstract: The talk will consider three methods of estimating the confidence levels of survey respondents who say “don’t know”. In other words, how confident would “don’t know” respondents have been if they had answered the question? Preliminary results speak to two main questions. First, to what extent do don’t know responses conceal meaningful beliefs or attitudes? Second, do demographic differences in the willingness to express an opinion arise from differential confidence or differential willingness to guess at a given confidence level?

Matt Graham is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Yale University. This work is part of a dissertation project that develops tools for incorporating confidence measures into interpretations of public opinion data.