“Blacks are getting too demanding in their push for equal rights. Agree or disagree?,” the poll asked. Another posed if blacks needed to “try harder” to “be as well off as whites.”
An exit poll questionnaire in SC yesterday. This is shameful! pic.twitter.com/MiS0FatnU5
— Auztin (@troyauztin) November 5, 2014
One woman who took the poll wrote of her initial excitement after being approached — she had heard so much about exit polls on TV — only to offended by the “deceptive” questions.
I know there are other people who took the poll and were offended and as confused as I was. Concerned citizens must stand up to people in our community who don’t seem to realize the impact these racist questions will have, especially on people of color. We were told this was an exit poll, not a survey about race, and that in itself is deceptive.
However, it turns out that the poll was worded this way on purpose. Researchers took the questions, word for word, from the Modern Racism Scale — a psychological test developed in 1986 that can be used to determine an individual’s inherent discriminations.
The political science researchers who conducted the poll say they administer this type of study often, and they were surprised at the anger to their questions in this latest round.
I spoke to the professor behind a controversial exit poll in #SouthCarolina. Here is my story. http://t.co/dBzvRATY9q #TimScott
— Dave Jordan (@DJNYC1) November 6, 2014
“We do this every day. We didn’t think too much about it until we got it out in the field and saw that there was some reaction,” said David Woodard, a political science professor at Clemson University, in an interview with Spartanburg news site WSPA.
“You had liberals getting offended. You had conservatives getting offended. It was all over the place,” added Paul White Jr., a doctoral candidate in political science from University of South Carolina.
“It was designed to take advantage of a political moment of Senator Tim Scott’s election as the first African-American from a southern state since reconstruction,” Woodard explained. “It was not designed to be provocative.”
See the full exit poll
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