October 12, 2005

A recent survey by the Orange County Business Council and Cal State Fullerton has found that Orange County residents have differing views regarding the county and the state. Seventy percent of the survey sample told interviewers that Orange County was going in the right direction, while only 40 percent of the same sample felt positively about the direction of the state of California.

This is a continuing trend in which local residents view the state of the county more positively than that of the state. “That’s typical,” said Phil Gianos, professor of political science at CSUF and director of the CSUF Center for Public Policy. “You can call it the Lake Wobegon effect, in which people tend to say that things are good close to home but tend to be a less positive about things elsewhere. Seventy to 80 percent of our respondents over the last several years of surveys have told us they think things in the county are going in the right direction.

“What has varied in our surveys is how our respondents view California,” Gianos continued. “The state has gone through a recall of the governor, to a honeymoon for the new governor, followed by a decline in his popularity. Our respondents have gone from one-fifth of them telling us prior to the recall that things in California were going in the right direction to 55 percent of them telling us that in late 2004. Now that proportion has declined to the present 40 percent. All this provides a background for the upcoming special election, in which the present state and the future direction of California will be the central issue.”

“The non-stop pounding of the governor’s positions in television commercials has certainly contributed to the negative image of state government and has raised doubts about the state’s direction,” said Wallace Walrod of the Orange Business Council.

The current survey was conducted for the CSUF Center for Public Policy / Orange County Business Council team by the Social Science Research Center at California State University, Fullerton (SSRC). The SSRC director is Gregory Robinson.

Telephone interviews were conducted utilizing Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) equipment and software. The CATI system is a sophisticated information-gathering protocol that contributes to the accuracy of data and to preserving the random nature of the sample.

A draft survey instrument was provided by the Center for Public Policy and refined by the Social Science Research Center for comprehensiveness, flow, length and factors that influence respondent cooperation and interest. Sample design and technical assistance with data analysis were provided by the SSRC.

These data result from 492 telephone surveys of households in Orange County. Of those 492 surveys, 407 were conducted using Random Digit Dialed (RDD) sampling techniques; 85 surveys were conducted with households reported by Scientific Telephone Samples, a professional provider of research telephone samples, to have incomes in excess of $145,000. The survey was administered by telephone between Aug. 16 and Sept. 11, 2005, by the SSRC. The population of inference is English-speaking heads of household or their spouses or domestic partners, 18 years of age or older, residing in households with telephones in Orange County.

Telephone interviews were conducted Monday through Thursday from 4 p.m. until 9 p.m. and on Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. The average administration time was 10.5 minutes.

The response rate for this telephone survey is 66.33 percent, calculated as the proportion of completed interviews among the estimated total number of eligible respondents. The margin of error for this random sample is plus or minus 4.51 percent. The margin of error will be larger when sub-groups of the sample are analyzed.

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