The several decades immediately preceding the writing of this study have seen increasing interest and criticism of public education on the part of the American people. This growth of interest in public education indicates a need for analysis of the nature and extent of popular concern so that it may be used as a positive force to improve the service of the public schools. If the best interests of the society for which public schools exist are to be served, heed must be taken of the interest and criticisms of reliable and sincere lay observers by the teachers and administrators who are responsible for the functioning of the public education system.

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Dynamic Linear Models are a state space model framework based on the Kalman filter. We use this framework to do seasonal adjustments of empirical and artificial data. A simple model and an extended model based on Gibbs sampling are used and the results are compared with the results of a standard seasonal adjustment method. The state space approach is then extended to discuss direct and indirect seasonal adjustments. This is achieved by applying a seasonal level model with no trend and some specific input variances that render different signal-to-noise ratios. This is illustrated for a system consisting of two artificial time series. Relative efficiencies between direct, indirect and multivariate, i.e. optimal, variances are then analyzed. In practice, standard seasonal adjustment packages do not support optimal/multivariate seasonal adjustments, so a univariate approach to simultaneous estimation is presented by specifying a Holt-Winters exponential smoothing method. This is applied to two sets of time series systems by defining a total loss function that is specified with a trade-off weight between the individual series’ loss functions and their aggregate loss function. The loss function is based on either the more conventional squared errors loss or on a robust Huber loss. The exponential decay parameters are then estimated by minimizing the total loss function for different trade-off weights. It is then concluded what approach, direct or indirect seasonal adjustment, is to be preferred for the two time series systems. The dynamic linear modeling approach is also applied to Swedish political opinion polls to assert the true underlying political opinion when there are several polls, with potential design effects and bias, observed at non-equidistant time points. A Wiener process model is used to model the change in the proportion of voters supporting either a specific party or a party block. Similar to stock market models, all available (political) information is assumed to be capitalized in the poll results and is incorporated in the model by assimilating opinion poll results with the model through Bayesian updating of the posterior distribution. Based on the results, we are able to assess the true underlying voter proportion and additionally predict the elections. / <p>At the time of doctoral defence the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 3: Manuscript; Paper 4: Manuscripts</p>

Diploma thesis Journalists and Public Opinion Polls: Media Representation of Public Opinion in the case of the First Direct Presidental Election in Czech Republic deals with an issue of media representation of public opinion polls and journalists' attitudes towards these polls. From the theoretical point of view this thesis focuses on definition of concepts such as public and public opinion, examination of how these concepts are approached within public opinion polls and investigation of possible influence of mediated public opinion polls on recipient of media messages. The main part of this thesis describes results of academic studies that address an issue of media coverage of pre-election polls. Analytic part is divided into two parts. The first part deals with media content analysis, the second one deals with journalists' attitudes towards polls. We can conclude that interviewed journalists are rather skeptical about public opinion polls while this scepticism is not followed by critical interpretation of pre-election poll results. This conclusion rises a question why journalists' sceptical attitude doesn't correspond with media coverage of polls that was found rather uncritical. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1963 M33

This thesis deals with the relationship between media coverage of political parties and election results. Specifically, it focuses on four political parties (TOP 09, Věci veřejné, KDU- ČSL and Strana zelených) in the period of nine months before the parliamentary elections in May 2010. The two established political parties were not successful in these elections (KDU- ČSL and Strana zelených), the other two parties were. Using quantitative content analysis of media content this work examines media coverage of these four parties in nationwide television, radio and print media. The thesis compares differences between media presentations of the parties with the evolution of political preferences of the parties. As a source, monthly data acquired by two public opinion research agencies - CVVM and Median - was used. Even more important to answer the research questions was to compare the media presentation of the parties with their final election results. The thesis assumes that the form of media presentation of the parties is one of the factors that affects their voters' support. Based on the data found this thesis tries to find out trends and patterns guiding the relationship between media space which parties achieved, the development of their electoral preferences and the final election results.

We introduce an electoral pollster in a two-candidate costly voting model to study the incentives that pollsters have regarding the release of poll results. In our model, the pollster has private knowledge about the distribution of citizens\' preferences, but it may report false information to the public. If this happens, we say the pollster is misreporting the poll. An often heard criticism about pollsters is that they might manipulate in order to benefit some candidate. We show that they have incentives to misreport even in the absence of ideological motives. Moreover, misreported polls are welfare-improving relative to truthful polls. / Introduz-se um instituto de pesquisa eleitoral em um modelo de voto custoso a fim de estudar quais incentivos os institutos possuem ao divulgarem suas pesquisas. No nosso modelo, o instituto possui informação privada a respeito da distribuição de preferências da sociedade sobre os candidatos, mas pode escolher reportar incorretamente essa informação ao público. Se isso acontece, diremos que o instituto manipulou a pesquisa eleitoral. Uma preocupação comum das pessoas em relação aos institutos de pesquisa é a possibilidade de eles manipularem uma pesquisa eleitoral com o objetivo direto de beneficiar um determinado candidato. Nós mostramos que eles possuem incentivos para manipular a pesquisa mesmo na ausência de motivações partidárias. Ainda, essa manipulação aumenta o bem-estar da sociedade, em comparação com pesquisas verdadeiras.

Project (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Statistics, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 66-67).