Thesis (M.S.)--Boston University

This thesis approaches the theoretical concepts of public opinion, its history and origins of public opinion research in the Czechoslovak Republic and abroad. It describes the circumstances of the creation, operation and termination of the Czechoslovak Institute for Public Opinion Research, which was established under the leadership of Josef Kopta and came under the I. Department of the Ministry of Information. More particularly provides a detailed view of The Veřejné mínění Journal, which was published between 1946 and 1948 and the publisher was the institute. Among the personalities associated with the institute and the magazine belonged Čeněk Adamec, Bohuš Pospíšil and Milan A. Tesař. The journal represented a Europe-wide unique. No other institution published a similar format of the journal, which conceived as the major topic of public opinion. It was a professional and popularization journal, which was addressed to experts and the general public. Individual subsections describe the specific content of the journal, which, inter alia, consist of professional articles of various kinds, reports on domestic and foreign researches, comments from readers and other sections. Special attention is given to information related to the field of media.

The diploma thesis focuses on the youngest age cathegory of respondents in public opinion polls. The main goal is to examine character and quality of information about adolescent's attitudes and opinions obtained in public opinion polls that are held by The Public Opinion Research Centre. To achieve the main goal nonattitude is examined. The thesis will be divided into theoretical and practical part. Theoretical part stands on the basis of public opinion sociology and developmental psychology and the issue of attitude measurement is introduced along with adolescents developmental theory and characteristics. Practical part reflects the information summoned in theoretical part and test them on data collected by The Public Opinion Research Centre which were obtained in continuous research within project Our society. Analysis focuses on examination of nonresponse, don't know answers and neutral attitudes. Results are compared among all age groups.

It is well known that a strong education system produces citizens who are more engaged in civil and social duties, with obvious benefits to society and the individuals. Policymakers who have the power to help improve the education system frequently rely on the news or the polls to better understand the issues involved, but these tools are often unable to answer customized questions on the public view with a large enough coverage. Monitoring the American public interest in education over the years is not new. In fact, a number of national polling agencies have tracked education as part of their larger polls asking people to name the most burning issues facing the US. While these polls provide a fair indication of the changes in importance of education in the eyes of the public, they do not identify the factors which have historically been associated with the major fluctuations of such importance. Most importantly, these traditional national polls do not track public concern about specific subtopics within education. This mixed methods study includes the creation of a software instrument with the objective of exploring the salience of education as a national priority over time and analyzing the possible factors associated with these fluctuations of interest. In addition to discovering the most prominent latent subtopics affecting education (such as academic achievement, sexual assault and freedom of speech), this study also seeks national-level issues that may have recently been associated with the largest declines. The only source of data utilized is the text of tens of thousands of published news articles. Terms extracted from the text using natural language processing serve as the basis for automated qualitative analysis. As topics emerge from the data, the frequencies of the terms are utilized to associate the articles with the most relevant ones. The analysis shows that public interest in education has declined the most during election times. It is also found that the areas that contributed the most during the largest surges of public interest in education from 2015 to 2020 were school budget, academic achievement gaps and mental health.

The diploma thesis Interpretation of Pre-election Polls in The Czech Printed Dailies studyies the ways in which media portrays data from election polls as part of thier news service. The thesis draws from theories of media effects, the research of which indicates a possible influence of media content on the formation of public opinion or even voting behaviour. For this reason, it maz be expected that the media present data in line with certain standards. However, in the Czech Republic, there is no code of conduct that would formulate such requirements. This leads to an ongoing struggle between the research agencies who supply such data and the media who present it to the public, where each party judges the content's quality by different measures. Some of the often criticised errors include misinterpretation of data and an insufficient explanation of the research's background. This paper uses quantitative content analysis to examine 154 articles from Czech printed journals across the three pre-election periods (2010, 2013, 2017) with the aim of determining in which form the results of pre- election polls are presented, and if all necessary data are added. The final analysis looks at the data as a whole as well as examining the trendlines during the studied time period. In conclusion, it evaluates...

The thesis analyses the differences that result from using of specific data collection method, computer assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) and computer assisted personal interviewing (CAPI). The main findings are based on election model built by research agency TNS Aisa for elections to the Chamber of Deputies of the Parliament of the Czech Republic in 2013. The aim of the thesis is to determine whether the chosen method of data collection influences the results of the estimated electoral preferences, to determine in which sociodemographic categories it is happening and whether the differences in the obtained data are related to the ideological orientation of the political parties. The dependence of the results on the data collection method is assessed by the chi-quadrate independence test. Further, through personal interviews with researchers, it is determined at what stage of the research process the data may be distorted and what its possible causes are. The benefit of the thesis is the finding that the chosen method of collection influences the established preferences among voters aged 30-44, university graduates and voters living in Prague. In these groups, the left-hand side ČSSD is preferred more by personal interviewing and right-handed TOP 09 through telephone interviewing. The collection of data itself was evaluated by the most risky phase of the research process, in which possible distortion could occur. While the accuracy of personal interviewing depends largely on the interviewer's personality, the sources of distortion of the telephone inquiry result more from the nature of the use of the phone itself.

Orientador: Marcelo Siqueira Ridenti / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-17T20:34:47Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Martini_SilviaRosanaModena_D.pdf: 2314349 bytes, checksum: 1489ecd967acc618140445218ea3ebda (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: A modernidade que se desenhava nos anos 1950 nos dois maiores centros urbanos brasileiros, fundamentada na posse e consumo de bens industrializados, contrastava com o Brasil predominantemente rural. À medida que a população se urbanizava, novos produtos, que caracterizavam um padrão de vida urbano e moderno, incorporam-se ao consumo dos brasileiros: o automóvel, a televisão, o aspirador de pó, a enceradeira, a geladeira e centenas de outros produtos, frutos do capitalismo industrial. Desenvolvimento, para a maioria da população, significava a posse destes bens duráveis. Inicialmente, o estilo de vida moderno espraiou-se nos grandes centros urbanos, entre o empresariado e a classe média alta, posteriormente, pela força dos meios de comunicação - rádio e televisão - atingiu as classes menos privilegiadas. As pesquisas de opinião pública do IBOPE ? que fundamentam este trabalho ?, depositadas no Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth, constituem-se em rica fonte documental para quem pretende estudar o comportamento dos moradores dos grandes centros urbanos brasileiros, pois trazem à tona o cotidiano de homens e mulheres que vivenciaram os anos 1950 e passaram a consumir determinados bens, quer seja materiais ou simbólicos, atrelados a um processo mundial: a formação da sociedade de consumo / Abstract: The modernity developed during the years of 1950 at the two biggest brazilian urban centers, based upon ownership and consumption of industrialized goods, diverged from a Brazil predominantly rural. As the population would become urbanized, new products that would feature an urban and modern lifestyle would be added to Brazilians consumptions: cars, television, hoover, floor polisher, refrigerator and hundred of other products as a reward of the industrial capitalism. Development for most people meant the possession of these non perishable goods. Initially the modern lifestyle spread through the big urban centers among entrepreneurs and high middle class, at a later time through the media - radio and television - it reached the less privileged class. The public opinion surveys by IBOPE (Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics) from which this paper is based filed at Arquivo Edgard Leuenroth constitute a rich documental source to those who intend to study the behavior of the residents of brazilian big urban centers as they evoke the daily life of men and women who experienced the years of 1950 and started acquiring specific goods either material or symbolic ones attached to a worldwide process: the creation of a consumerism society / Doutorado / Trabalho, Cultura e Ambiente / Doutor em Sociologia

Bibliographic record PROKOP, Daniel. (2012). Election polls in the Czech Republic: Methodological Optimization. Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, Institut of Sociological Studies. Thesis academic consultant: Mgr. Jindřich Krejčí, Ph.D. Abstract The thesis focuses on the election-polls and prediction of election results in the Czech Republic. Using data of research company MEDIAN s.r.o. from face-to-face (CAPI) and telephone interviewing (CATI) in election year 2010 it examines possibilities of methodological optimizations which could lead to reducing systematic bias and discrepancies of pre-election polls the election results. In particular, it discusses these methodological solutions: mix-mode data collection (combination of CATI and CAPI), data weighting focused on specific factors correlated with voting behavior, including preferences of undecided voters, prediction of the respondents' participation in elections, election-polls results time-series smoothing. Based on these analyses the thesis tries to articulate general findings which could be fruitful in discussion about Czech election-polls and their methodology in general. In the thesis, basic and advanced statistic methods (CART, exponential smoothing, etc.) are being used to achieve given research goals. Keywords: election...