Survey self-reports wildly overstate environmental organization membership

Evidence

However, assuming that all members contributed to only one organization and left after two years, a maximum of sixteen million Americans, or 8 percent of all adults, could have contributed over five years, as compared with the GSS-based rate of 49 percent. Plausible estimates for subnational environmental giving could not close that gap. — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 2057

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Organizational self-reports of membership counts can be administratively frozen — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 1905; Directory undercounting and un-purged lists mask grassroots environmental decline — Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone The Collapse and Revival…, 2058; Survey researchers distrust self-report yet their closed-ended items miss respondents’ phenomenology (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Even best-effort surveys cannot verify respondents’ truthfulness #corroborates (0.80) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2213
• Awareness of group membership differs from desire for that membership #expands (0.78)
• Unbalanced survey scales allow response bias to inflate apparent reliability #expands (0.75)
• Survey researchers distrust self-report yet their closed-ended items miss respondents’ phenomenology #corroborates (0.72)
• Strongly worded survey items correlate no better than mild ones #expands (0.71) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 828