Pack Poll, a team of undergraduate students who conduct representative surveys at NC State, recently released the results of a NC State undergraduate student survey on protesting and President Trump, finding that students have different opinions on protests depending on question order.
Protesting responses were tallied by approval or disapproval, and the Trump survey invited students to record a word that came to mind when first thinking about the president.
In general, the results found students tend to support protesting done by NFL football players kneeling during the national anthem more so than white nationalists marching in protest of the removal of Confederate statues in Charlottesville. The Trump survey, on the other hand, showed that students overwhelmingly don’t support the president, finding that for every positive word recorded, there were 25 negative ones.
For the protesting polls, the statement, “For the most part, people who protest and demonstrate against US policy are good, upstanding, intelligent people,” was placed either before or after specific questions regarding the NFL and Charlottesville protests, and students were asked to judge their approval of the statement.
Seventy-two percent of respondents said that they agreed or strongly agreed with national anthem protests when the question was asked before the statement, however this number dropped to 65 percent when the statement was placed before the question on national anthem protests.
Regarding Charlottesville protests, 41 percent of students said they agreed with the protests in Charlottesville when the question was asked before the statement, but this number dropped down to 31 percent when the statement was came before the question. Less than 10 percent said that they strongly agreed with the Charlottesville protests in either order.
Rebekah Lee, a fourth-year studying political science and member of Pack Poll, discussed the impact of this question placement on the results of the survey.
“It mainly confirmed what we speculated,” Lee began. “When you ask a specific question first, they are more likely to form an opinion. When you ask a specific question about an NFL protest, if you approve of that form of protest, you’re thinking ‘Okay, these are good people,’ and you answer yes. Whereas if you have in your head as Charlottesville and white nationalists, you might not think they’re very good people. They might have a different answer.”
According to Lee, although students may say that they are in favor of freedom of speech, opinion changes when they do not agree with what the people are protesting.
In fall 2016, Pack Poll released two word clouds with students’ answers to what they thought of candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Compared to the most recent word cloud, Trump’s words remained consistently negative; “idiot” and “incompetent” reigned the most popular in 2017, while “racist” and “idiot” were of the highest in quantity in fall 2016.
One student said “paper towels,” in the flash poll, referencing Trump throwing paper towel rolls at a crowd of Puerto Ricans following the devastation of Hurricane Maria.
Regarding the word cloud designed from the results of the Trump poll, Michael Cobb, advisor of Pack Poll, discussed the survey’s results.
“It [the results] doesn’t pertain to the demographic,” Cobb said. “Even Republican students are not enamored with Trump. I think the reason why is that most students call themselves socially liberal. Trump is violating a lot of values and preferences students identify with and they are less tethered to their parties.”
Lee also commented on why this specific type of survey was used to analyze students’ perceptions of Trump.
“We were looking for more specific things, so what people thought of when Trump came to their mind,” Lee remarked. “We did that with Hillary too. It just provides an interesting thing to see what people are thinking of a president or candidate.”
