Surveys located

I have located at least two good surveys from the 2004 election. One is a CBS/NYT poll from March 10-14, 2004. The other is a Pew Research Center survey from June 17, 2004. Both of these have a portion devoted to asking respondents about particular issues and their importance. While they aren't exactly the same, most of the issues duplicate on both polls (which I consider a really good thing). If you want, I can copy out the results and e-mail them to you. The fact that the issues are almost the same and ranked in a similar order PLUS these are from two different time frames makes me think that we can use these to identify our party ideology. There are probably other surveys out there, but I'm inclined to say these are good enough for me. (Am I getting lazy, or am I just too concerned about time?????)

Getting back to work

The last week has been weird and stressful for all of us. I know that I basically got nothing done last week after the hurricane. I plan to get back to work on the research in the next couple of days, and I plan to have located some opinion polls from 2004 to use in the party ideology section. I will also review the van Dijk article (as I never finished it the first time), and I'll look over the research questions that Pete posted.

I think we need to settle on research questions before we approach the codesheet. Also, have we decided on inter-coder reliability stuff? I think Barry said that we need to do a couple of things in order to make sure that we're covered on that part of the research. I might need clarification on that issue.

Also, can we set a target date for beginning the coding? I feel time slipping away, and it makes me nervous.