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' Mexican Views Of The U. S. Turn Sharply Negative?

Decent Essays

In the survey, “Mexican Views of the U.S. Turn Sharply Negative,” by Margaret Vice and Hanyu Chwe, the Pew Research Center assesses Mexico’s sentiments toward the United States. The survey focused on three general areas: dramatic shifts in how Mexicans see the United States, Mexican pessimism about their country’s direction, and poor ratings for Pena Nieto and political parties. The target population, the group to whom the survey was intended to generalize, was the entire adult, those eighteen years and older, Mexican population (excluding insecure areas). The sample was drawn from 1,000 individuals. The survey was fielded March 2nd to April 10th, 2017. The survey consisted of face to face interviews conducted in Spanish, weighting …show more content…

Without a sample that has been slected from random selection as probability samples are, one cannot generalize. Coverage error, the failure to give some persons in a target population a chance to be selected into the sample, was present in the survey because insecure areas were not represented. The survey attempted to mitigate coverage errors by conducting face to face interviews to eliminate the coverage bias introduced by phone interviews. The response rate was not reported in the methodology page. However, if the response rate was 25%, that would indicate that the 1,000-sample size was taken from 4,000 individuals. Whether response rate affects data quality is a matter of debate, yet, according to Hillygus, “multiple studies have found that lower response rates do not indicate the results are inaccurate” (Hillygus 42). The role response rates have on the accuracy of results is uncertain, but inclusion of it provides insight into the quality of the methods. Similarly, there exist several sources for measurement of error: the questionnaire, the data collection method, the interviewer, and the respondent. The questionnaire utilized was not provided in the report. Therefore, evaluation of the question wording effects and the response categories for questions cannot be made. However, according to the Pew Research, translation was carefully cared out in a multi-step process and data collection was meticulously recorded.

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