2007-03-08

69% support, sort of

I expect there is quite a bit more in the raw data than in the part of the announcement that is carried in this news story. Strategic's survey finds that 69% of people in Serbia support cooperation with ICTY, 15% for reasons of justice, 28% to avoid negative consequences, and 26% to satisfy the EU. I'd like to do some crosstabs and longitudinals on that.

Update: OSCE has the summary.
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3 comments:

Eric Gordy said...

Yes, I have been following the results on these questions since Strategic did their first survey in 2001. This is the only agency that has been asking the same questions periodically over several years, so it's a very rich source, potentially. My buddy Saška and I are also putting in for a grant that would allow us to get Strategic's raw data and do some reanalysis, and maybe also commission a couple of narrower followup surveys.

Two possible interpretations of the "know/believe/regard as a crime" question sets are:

1. There really is a very low level of knowledge. Strategic has also consistently found that people are unsatisfied with their level of knowledge, and have very low levels of trust in media institutions. At the same time, this finding has always surprised me a bit, since anybody who has spent time in the region knows that most people are voracious consumers of all kinds of information.

Which leads me to favor the second option,

2. There are unique circumstances that prevent a methodological problem for survey research, and when people answer questions about whether they "know" or "believe" something, they do not interpret the question literally. These methodological problems are consequences of a larger condition of distrust, which has accompanied the destruction of institutions.

10/3/07 16:18
Anonymous said...

"...the exclusive focus on Serb victimhood."

Well that certainly expresses your 'opinion'.

Who in the Balkans isn't playing the victim card and who is it who has the 'moral right' to tell us who is 'right' and who is 'wrong'?

You could also say exactly the same of the Croats, Bosnian Moslems and Kosovo Albanians: "We did nuffink wrong. It woz wot them uvers who wuz criminals"

You can also read whatever you like into such reports.

Most Serbs that I've come across have never said that they were solely 'victims', but that "it was a civil war and everybody committed crimes".

Is this an unreasonable point of view?

(The Diaspora is an entirely different kettle of fish.)

10/3/07 16:19
Eric Gordy said...

Oops, in that last comment I meant "present," not "prevent."

Here's a segment of a piece I wrote on the results of Strategic's 2001 survey, for illustration.

A curious contradiction emerges with regard to the question of knowledge. The preceding results suggest that knowledge of at least some events is widespread in Serbia. At the same time, when asked directly, respondents do not indicate that they believe that they are themselves well informed. 22.3% of respondents consider themselves well informed about the wars in Croatia, while 19.4% of respondents consider themselves well informed about the wars in Bosnia-Hercegovina. Nor did respondents indicate that they believed that their fellow citizens were well informed.

However, when asked the admittedly long and possibly confusing question, “Has it ever happened that a new fact which you have learned from any source about any event related to the conflicts (wars in Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Kosovo) caused you to change your thinking or position about the role (responsibility) of the warring sides?,” an overwhelming 85.5% answered in the negative. Despite this somewhat discouraging result from the point of view of efforts to promote information, the survey results suggest some potential guidelines for efforts to disseminate information.

These results suggest a wide gap between the sources of information people trust and the sources they actually use. Asked what were their primary sources of information during the war, responses broke down as follows:

RTS-TV/state media 80.4%
Independent papers
(Blic, Glas, Danas) 67.9%
Stories of witnesses 62.3%
Stories of relatives 45.5%
State-controlled papers
(Politika, Expres, Novosti)43.1%
Independent radio/TV
(ANEM, B-92) 42.4%
Personal experience 17.4%

When people were asked what sources of information they trusted, the structure of responses was different, as follows:

Source Trusted Did not trust
RTS-TV
23.2% 42.5%
State-controlled papers
28.8% 36.5%
Independent papers
44.7% 17.9%
Independent radio/TV
62.4% 16.2%
Relatives
68.6% 16.2%
Witnesses
62.2% 15.4%

10/3/07 16:24

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