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Innovative WSU approach ignites survey industry, earns national award

WSU researchers will receive a national award for designing a new survey method that is now used in censuses around the world.

WSU Regents Professor Don Dillman and a team of former graduate students will receive the Warren J. Mitofsky Innovators Award from the American Association for Public Opinion Research. The last award was granted in 2015 to Nate Silver, creator of FiveThirtyEight , the statistics-based news site.

The WSU team’s innovation is overcoming the negative effects that modern communication trends have on public opinion survey results by turning to an old-school source: postal mail.

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WSU News

Study: Environmental views can come from pulpits, not politicos

For some, the battle lines over environmental policy are drawn on religious—not necessarily political—grounds, suggests a new study by sociologists at the University of Nebraska and Washington State University.

The study in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion found that religious ideologies are driving opposition to environmental spending. More specifically, evangelical Protestants—usually perceived as the most conservative of Christians—are less likely to support environmental spending based on a literal interpretation of the Bible.

Johnson

The findings were culled from surveys collected from 1984 to 2012. Study co-author Erik Johnson, WSU associate professor of sociology, looked at three possible causes of evangelicals’ opposition to environmental spending: church attendance, political affiliation and biblical literalism. Only biblical literalism played a significant role across all three decades studied, and when comparing evangelicals to all other religious groups.

The findings may also explain why President Donald Trump felt core supporters would approve of his June 1 action to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Accord, despite its favorability to the general public. Evangelical Protestants, who largely supported Trump, tend to disagree.

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Nebraska Today

Beatrice Daily Sun

Religion News Service

Other sources:

America Magazine – click to view

Sight Magazine – click to view

The Northern Star – click to view

Noosa News – click to view

The Gazette – click to view

What’s the ‘greatest witch hunt of a politician in American history’? We asked the experts

Who is the most unfairly investigated U.S. politician of all time?

According to President Trump, he is. But in conversations with academics, President Bill Clinton emerged above all other politicians as the most unfairly targeted.

Cornell Clayton
Clayton

“[It] began with business dealings in Whitewater and after years and millions of dollars wound up with Monica Lewinsky,” said Cornell W. Clayton, a professor of government and public policy at Washington State University.

Lewinsky was the White House intern with whom Clinton had an affair. Whitewater was the name of a real estate company with questionable practices that had included Bill and Hillary Clinton as investors. While more than a dozen people were convicted in the real estate inquiry, the president was absolved.

Congress impeached President Clinton on charges of obstruction and lying about having the affair, but then acquitted him.

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Los Angeles Times

WSUV student body president defeats addiction, earns bachelor’s

Skye TroySkye Troy is still learning to talk about the hardest times in her life, including being kicked out of high school for doing drugs, and later arrested for stealing credit cards.

The student body president spoke at Washington State University Vancouver’s commencement ceremony, where she received her degree in public affairs.

Now 22 and clean for six years, Troy hopes to go to work as a government relations liaison in the fields of social justice, economic equality and women’s rights. She’s passionate for social reform at the local level, drawing from her own experience growing up in the rural Oklahoma city of Owasso to drive her.

“I had to overcome so many obstacles,” she said.

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The Columbian

Study: Tennessee among worst states to be a police officer

Being a police officer isn’t the most glamorous job in the world, but a recent study suggests it’s worse to be one in some states than others, and Tennessee is near the bottom of the barrel.

One of the issues for modern officers most frequently cited by a panel of academic experts quoted in the study is the erosion of public trust in law enforcement over the last several years.

Dale Willits“The single largest issue facing police officers today is the incredible amount of tension between police, as an institution, and the communities they serve and the resultant lack of legitimacy,” wrote Dale Willits, assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice and Criminology at Washington State University.

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Times Free Press