The Iraq war is the most important 2008 election issue to students, according to School of Communication professor Jane Hall, who taught a class in which students conducted a national survey on students and the upcoming election.
In the survey, Hall's "Politics and the Media" class asked college students across the United Status to reveal which topics were most important to them and will be deciding factors in the 2008 elections. The 25 students in the class worked with The Washington Post, produced an entire survey and had their stories about the survey published on the Post's Web site, according to Hall.
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SURVEY RESULTS
Students from around the country weighed in on election '08 in a survey conducted by professor Jane Hall's "Politics and the Media" class. Top responses to some questions on the survey are below: "If the election were held today, which candidate would you vote for?" Obama: 27 percent Clinton: 18 percent Giuliani: 6 percent Edwards: 5 percent Huckabee: 5 percent Paul: 4 percent Undecided or not voting: 19 percent "What is the most important issue to you, personally?" Education: 12 percent Iraq: 12 percent Health care: 9 percent Economy: 8 percent Foreign policy: 6 percent Abortion: 6 percent SOURCE: "Politics and the Media" survey -Allie Feras |
This was also an opportunity for The Washington Post to publish a survey about college students created by college students, she said.
The process started with the entire class discussing topics the students felt were important to today's youth, said Marc Tomik, a senior in the School of Public Affairs who took Hall's class.
"You hear what the media and candidates think, but it's interesting to narrow down the big topics like health care and abortion and think, 'What's important to me?'" Tomik said.
Hall said she recruited two fellow faculty members - SOC professors Dotty Lynch and Maria Ivancin - and Jon Cohen, the Post's polling director, to assist her class in conducting the poll.
"I enlisted their help when I realized we'd be conducting a national survey," she said. "It was really exciting to work with the other faculty."
The three guests helped with phrasing the questions, a process which was more difficult than initially assumed, Tomik said.
"After we processed the results, we noticed questions that could have been set up differently," he said.
Some of the questions were open-ended, while others were multiple-choice. For instance, the survey asked what candidate the student would likely vote for in the next presidential election but didn't offer any of the candidates' names. They made this decision for two reasons, Hall said.
"We were looking to see what people would volunteer, who they already knew," she said. "Also, in national polls, they rotate the first name. If you put someone's name first, people are more likely to choose them."
Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., received the highest number of mentions; 27 percent of those surveyed said they planned to vote for Obama, according to the Post. Though the survey did ask whether students viewed themselves as liberal, conservative or moderate, it did not ask party affiliation because today's youth tend not to associate itself with a particular party, Hall said.
To decide who would take the survey, each student was responsible for the names of six college students from somewhere in the United States. They selected a sample size of 125 students based on the results of a 2002 census of college students, Hall said.
The survey produced what the class and Hall said were interesting results. Of the 108 people who returned the survey, 96 percent said they are planning to vote in the next presidential election, according to Melissa Rosenberg, a senior in SOC.
"We expected college students to be engaged in the upcoming election," she said. "But 96 percent is a big number."
As for important issues in the 2008 election, students felt the Iraq war was the most important issue for their generation as a whole, Hall said.
"College students are showing a lot of concern for the world they are going to inherit," she said.
The survey also showed that while students are decidedly liberal on social issues such as same-sex marriage and abortion, their candidates did not have to agree with them on those issues. However, many students would not budge in their views on the environment, Hall said.
