Author name: Karen Cyphers, PhD

New Survey: Floridians express tension, concern for the First Amendment

You don’t need to look much farther than Founding Father Thomas Jefferson to get a taste for the polarity Americans feel about the media. Back in the days of quill pens, in 1786 Jefferson wrote: “Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.” But two decades …

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Floridians on property insurance special session: deep support, but low expectations

As Florida lawmakers return to Tallahassee for a special session on property insurance and more, they do so with a pretty clear message from constituents: “Fix it (if you can).”  This is the resounding takeaway from our December 2-5 survey of Florida voters, conducted to get a better sense of how residents – homeowners in …

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Polling through a pandemic: methods and madness

From managing canine “coworkers” to selecting the right virtual Zoom background, many Floridians have been navigating new waters in order to do our jobs amid COVID-19. To gauge these changes, we’ve been surveying large, random samples of Florida voters weekly since the pandemic exploded in mid-March. Our goal was, and still is, to glean what …

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On National Alzheimer’s Day, Get Lost in Numbers

First, my grandpa would lose his keys. That’s pretty normal. Then came the more telling signs – getting lost in hallways and in conversations. Then he washed important documents that had been kept in the dishwasher. That really upset my grandma, who assumed the papers were safe there since he hadn’t used the dishwasher in …

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We Scream for Ice Cream!

Professors teaching statistics like to tee up lessons on “correlation vs. causation” by giving examples of events that may appear statistically linked – but actually don’t have a cause-and-effect relationship. The most classic of these is the observation that ice cream consumption and murder rates spike at similar times, such as seen here: It isn’t …

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Survey: Finding Work-Life Balance In Tallahassee

How do Leon County residents feel about their work lives? Home lives? Balance between the two? Sachs Media Group’s Breakthrough Research Division polled over 500 professionals in September 2016 and found a few fun and unexpected correlations that may teach us something about what we can do as individuals and as a community to improve …

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