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Measuring Political Knowledge in the Mass Public: Calibrating a Useful Instrument.

William G. Jacoby, Ph.D., is a professor in the Department of Political Science at Michigan State University and a research scientist at the University of Michigan. There is little consensus among scholars as to the best way to measure the knowledge of individual citizens. One strategy relies upon interviewer assessments, though there are systematic differences in interviewers’ judgments. Professor Jacoby presents an approach for taking interviewer biases into account.