(Cross-posted from Think it Through)
It was Ronald Reagan who returned from a trip to South America and told reporters, "you can learn a lot by just listening." I was reminded of Reagan's revelation when an April Pew Research survey of the nation found that "the proportion saying that abortion should be legal in all or most cases has declined to 46% from 54% last August." This finding took many of us by surprise because abortion attitudes have been incredibly stable over the last 15 years.
While it will take time to learn whether this shift becomes a trend and why it occurred, the change points out the importance of listening closely to the people who respond to your surveys. The commitment to listening closely led Belden Russonello & Stewart to change the way we measure opinions on abortion, to reflect more closely the questions people ask themselves about abortion.
For many years BRS measured abortion opinions by using a standard question that Pew asked in April and which is used by other media polls such as Washington Post/ABC News. The question is:
Thinking about abortion, do you think abortion should be legal in all cases, legal in most cases, illegal in most cases, or illegal in all cases?
Four years ago, we noticed that when our interviewers asked this abortion question, many respondents objected to the categories. They told us they did not think of abortion in terms of how widely illegal it should be, but rather how much we should limit abortion. There were many who could not say that abortion should be illegal most of the time, but rather that it should be legal with many restrictions. We changed our abortion question to read:
Thinking about abortion, do you think abortion should be legal in almost all cases, legal in most cases, legal in just a few cases, or never legal?
We placed both of the above questions on a survey in 2004, using a split sample, and found that the numbers at the extremes stayed about the same:
- legal in all cases (19%) and legal in almost all cases (19%);
- illegal in all cases(18%) and never legal (21%).
The middle positions shifted, however.
- The new language told us that 20% chose legal in most cases and 36% chose legal in just a few cases.
- The traditional version had it flipped: 28% saying illegal in most cases and 32% saying legal in most cases.
The traditional wording can be misleading because it suggests that abortion opinions are an either-or proposition, when in fact, they are on a continuum. The legal vs. illegal frame for the abortion question pushes pollsters and news people to collapse the first two categories vs. the second two categories, so you report so much support FOR abortion and so much support AGAINST abortion. As the Pew release stated: "Currently 46% say abortion should be legal in most cases (28%) or all cases (18%); 44% believe that abortion should be illegal in most (28%) or all cases (16%)." This leads people to think half the public is for abortion and half is against, when it is a lot more interesting than that.
Between 56 and 60 percent of Americans count themselves somewhere in the middle on abortion. Unlike other issues, such as global warming, school vouchers, or economic stimulus programs from the federal government, there is no muddled middle on abortion. Rather, we see a firmly-ambivalent, or comfortably-conflicted middle. From our own research we know that these are people who do not subscribe to an ideological pro-women's rights or anti-abortion sentiment but rather have made a conscious decision to take a middle position because they believe the circumstances matter.
Thinking about abortion opinions in this way does not answer the question - what is the reason behind the shift in Pew's numbers on abortion? It does suggest that the movement detected by Pew is not so much a drop in overall support for abortion but some kind of shift in opinions on restrictions of one type or another.
The Pew question leads me to three suggestions: 1) change the four-way question to reflect how the public approaches abortion, by not placing things in a strictly legal vs. illegal mode, 2) stop emphasizing the collapsed categories, so that the news media must report abortion opinions on a continuum, not one side versus the other side; and 3) look more closely at the people taking a middle position. They are a majority of Americans.
As Ronald Reagan would have put it, "you can learn a lot by just listening."
John Russonello is a partner with Belden Russonello & Stewart: Public Opinion Research and Strategic Communications in Washington, DC. He writes the blog "Think it Through."