Europeans and their beliefs. Introduction to public opinion analysis WS-PO-EU-EATB
The course concerns the opinions of Europeans on the important political, social and economic issues. Students will have an opportunity to get familiar and compare the opinions of citizens of various European countries on such topics as relationship to the market economy and democracy, tax, euthanasia, abortion, etc. In the classes will be used freely available data from the European Social Survey and the World Value Survey. In both cases there are provided online analytical tools so students will be able to independently search for information of interest. The aim of the course is mainly the transfer of basic skills of analysing public opinion. Course content includes the following topics: characteristics of good surveys, basic principles of survey responses analysis, determinants of opinions and attitudes, usage of contingency tables. During the course students will have an opportunity to develop knowledge, analytical and soft skills. This applies to the understanding of other people, improving introspection skills, raising awareness of the presence of differences between people and obtaining skills to explain these differences.
(in Polish) Grupa przedmiotów ogólnouczenianych
Subject level
Learning outcome code/codes
Type of subject
Course coordinators
Learning outcomes
E1 - student can distinguish between properly and badly conducted public opinion research
E2 - student knows latest changes in European public opinion and can explain them
E3 - student can analyze public opinion using available data
Assessment criteria
Final grade:
50% test
50% final project
Bibliography
Boudon, Raymond, The Origins of Values. Transaction Publishers, 2001
Donsbach, Wolfgang, Michael W. Traugott (eds). The SAGE Handbook of Public Opinion Research. SAGE Publications Ltd, 2008.
Glynn, Carroll J., Susan Herbst, Robert Shapiro, Garrett O’Keefe. Public Opinion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1999.
Page, Benjamin I., Robert Y. Shapiro. The Rational Public: Fifty Years of Trends in Americans’ Policy Preferences. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 1992.
The Oxford Handbook of American Public Opinion and the Media. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
Additional information
Additional information (registration calendar, class conductors, localization and schedules of classes), might be available in the USOSweb system: