What Are You Talking about? Discussion Frequency of Issues Captured in Common Survey Questions

Abstract

Social science surveys regularly ask respondents to generate opinions or positions on issues deemed to be of political and social importance, such as confidence in government officials or federal spending priorities. Many theories assume that interpersonal deliberation is a primary mechanism through which people develop positions on such issues, but it is unclear how often the issues captured by such questions become a topic of conversation. Using an original survey of 2,117 American adults, we quantify how often people report discussing the issues tapped by 88 questions in the General Social Survey’s core questionnaire, as well as how often respondents say they individually reflect on these issues, how important they believe them to be, and how sensitive they believe it would be to discuss those issues. We find that the majority of respondents report discussing the majority of issues fewer than once or twice a year, with the modal response that respondents have never discussed an issue in the past year. At the same time, some topics—such as religious beliefs and generic appraisals of political leaders—come up quite frequently, and a small number of respondents report frequently discussing most items. We consider the implications of these findings for theories of belief formation.