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According to a recent study, Americans are more wary of atheists than they are of Muslims, Jews and homosexuals. Can I claim persecution now, can I? Anti-atheism?
Interestingly, the respondents associated atheism with “criminal behavior”, “rampant materialism” and “cultural elitism.” Because obviously, materialism, crime and etnocentrism are phenomena that are foreign to predominantly Christian America. America never invades other countries partly based on religious fancies. Nor does America buy more crap than any other nation on earth, creating a massive trade deficit for one. Nor do Americans constantly parrot the virtues of their way of life, affirm their culture and try to impose it on others. You know it makes sense.
If I’d been more of a believer in Freud, I’d call this projection.
2000 households were interviewed?! Hardly a good sampling out of a population of 300,000,000. Get a grip. While you’re at it…get a job.
I guess that in your reality, for results contrary to your rosy image of America to have any reliability, generalizability, and validity, they would have had to ask all 300M (even toddlers?), which is impossible hence America can never be shown to harbour any unhealthy attitudes?
I refer you to Gallup’s answer with regard to polls, the same basic idea should apply for other surveys:
http://media.gallup.com/PDF...
It is quite possible to argue that the method of selection is flawed (I don’t have the full text article on hand), however, a random selection of as few as 1000 respondents is usually accepted. The important factor is how many of those that actually participate and how the selection is done. Also, since science works the way it does, no one is trying to "prove" anything beyond a shadow of a doubt, just corroborate a theory, hence the sort of overambitious survey you suggest would not make the results more reliable and would still depend on the wording of questions and so forth. These and many other interesting facts are open to those that don’t have a "job."