There's Your First Problem Right There

 Grim has linked to a UC Davis study about political violence. The Introduction

Recent events in the United States (US)—mass shootings, Supreme Court decisions, hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, and others—have reminded Americans of the daily presence of violence in their nation’s public life. This study is motivated by 5 recent trends that, in their apparent convergence, create the potential for even greater violence that could put at risk the future of the US as a free and democratic society.

So we know - or at least I know, and Grim picked up on immediately - that they have a biased view of the topic, right out of the gate. This is important, because if they are designing questions, they will just naturally be drawn to phrasings that give away the game; they will unconsciously select the data around them that confirms their bias and will interpret that information in ways that accentuate that. (Grim drew his conclusion from their funding sources, noting that this does not disprove or even undermine their conclusions, but should be a red flag about where it might go wrong.)

And in fact, this is exactly what happens, beginning with the next paragraph, which outlines the limitations of previous attempts to define and measure support for violence and the difficulty of discerning exactly what is being said - and then immediately ignores that, going straight to naive interpretations of data and selective statistics about violence. One might almost think it was a "spot the bias" exercise specifically designed to instruct journalists and researchers, but alas, I have every reason to believe this is intended for straight. Worse, I have every reason to believe that if the researchers were informed there were a couple of minor blogs which detected bias in their work, they would be unable to pick out what that is, even when cued.

So I will point it out, futilely for them and likely unnecessarily for my audience and thus likely only for my own enjoyment. Except I'm not enjoying it, so "exercise" might be a better word.

Mass shootings...are not up over time, and thus are not to be counted as recent events in the sense of a trend, as said events have occurred both remotely and recently. Yet the intent is clear that we are to think so, to get activated to our danger immediately, as it they are the first thing mentioned.

Supreme Court decisions...define your terms, please. Do you mean that previous SCOTUS decisions have not tended to remind Americans of "the daily presence of violence" but recent ones have?  Which decisions, exactly, and in what way do they remind us of violence? I will stretch a bit and offer there is a feeling, not quite clear in their own minds, that there is increased danger of violence as evidenced by the fact that "our side is losing." If they mean something else, I would like to know what that is, for after it was stripped of the initial explanation of "trust in institutions" and "feelings of powerlessness" what we will have is some actual violence from the left, against buildings, against people, and yes, the sense that "our side is losing." 

Hearings investigating...but those are events from 18 months ago, so however concerning they might be, they aren't a reminder of a daily presence of violence, they are more a daily reminder of previous violence. Tricksy. Or not. The frightening thing is that they are not trying to intentionally reword things to trick us and make us think of violence. They likely just think this way on their own, are getting nervous, and are expressing why, knowing that their audience largely shares their bias and thus are among friends.

...and others.  What others? Please, do tell.  Otherwise we will have to give you no credit for anything except puffery.

Others might include increased riots  over the last two years, but those go strangely unmentioned. And others might include digging into the later statistics about the alarming increase in homicides - they are careful to tie that to GUNS! GUNS! Do you hear me, they've got GUNS! - but not so careful to tell us exactly where these increases are occurring, whether it relates to changes in policing, and who is doing it. Why, you would think it was just this troubling increase in people* being willing to be violent because of their attitudes. Or maybe the Supreme Court is making us do this.

All of this not to say that there is nothing useful in their study.  It is just that it is tedious having to apply a discount to every statistic. They make much of an answer endorsed by 32% of Americans about "a group of people in this country [is] trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants." Well, replace isn't the word I would choose, as it carries an air of getting rid of those people, and that is an extremity of view held by few (I hope.) But there are unquestionably people, and they have NGO's who are tickled to tell you the projections that whites are decreasing in percentage of Americans ("and you'd better get used to it, bucko") and advocating we bring in more immigrants. And can I just say that "native-born" is a very accurate description of black people more than white in America, as they have generally been native for two centuries or more, while a lot of Swedes, Jews, and Irish came later. Yet I think the term was chosen to suggest whiteness without actually saying so.  That may be a reach on my part, At any rate, there is a group in this country who want to "replace" native-born by immigration (plus fertitlity, I suppose), and they will say it right out loud.  I might use phrasings about increasing the number of immigrants as less loaded.  But we don't get to choose the wording of poll questions.  We don't get to say "Yes, but..." to them.  We have to take what is offered and choose agree versus disagree.  When I am presented with a question like that I get annoyed, because I both know what is a correct answer and also what false conclusion they are going to draw.  As here. 

And here's the kicker on that last one: the original poll question, out of the University of Chicago, closed with the phrase "for electoral purposes."  Well, that's a different kettle of fish, isn't it? That actually does take us into the realm of flat dishonesty, of leaving out a key bit of information to make one thing look like another.  Also, from the line just before that reporting "...two-thirds of Americans feel the country’s diverse population makes the US stronger – less than 10% say diversity weakens the country." How are we to square that with the dire language of 32% of Americans believing in dark conspiracies to replace them?

This grows tiresome, as a favorite psychiatrist of mine used to say at team meetings. You can try to gather information from the study if you want.  There are valuable things there. But the signal to noise ratio is poor.

*And by this point you have a clear idea how those people are voting.