GSAS Students Win Award for Work Measuring Support for Black Presidential Candidate

Jennifer Heerwig and Brian McCabe, doctoral candidates in the Graduate School of Arts and Science, have received an award from the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers (AAPOR) for their paper exploring a discrepancy in public opinion data—nearly twice as many registered voters claim to support a black presidential candidate as say America is ready for a black president. 

      The paper received AAPOR’s Seymour Sudman Student Paper Award, which is annually given to an exceptional work related to the study of public opinion or to the theory and methods of survey research. Heerwig and McCabe are third-year Ph.D. students in NYU’s Department of Sociology. 

      In the paper, “Social Desirability Bias in Estimated Support for a Black Presidential Candidate,” Heerwig and McCabe found that when asked directly about support for a black presidential candidate, respondents significantly over-report support. In particular, they found that Democrats and liberals report higher levels of overt support and have higher levels of social desirability reporting—the tendency of respondents to give answers in line with perceived social norms—than do Republicans and conservatives. Other evidence suggests that well-educated and politically active respondents are the least likely to misreport their support for a black presidential candidate.

      The award, given since 1967, will be presented at the association’s annual conference, May 15-18 in New Orleans. For a copy of the paper, go to: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jah321/sdb_ black_pres.pdf

                                —James Devitt