Relational Analysis of Educational Belief Systems

We know little about how the American public organizes its beliefs about education. A key emerging insight from the sociology of culture is that the typical ways of studying public opinion data may mask heterogeneity in how people understand and structure their attitudes about areas of public life like education. In this paper, I explore educational belief systems using data from Phi Delta Kappa's annual public opinion survey on education. More specifically, I employ Correlational Class Analysis to identify three subsets of respondents whose members configure their beliefs about testing, integration, and enhanced curriculum in distinct ways. Compared to the full sample, these subsamples display more structure in the associations among their responses among these beliefs. I also examine relationships between attitudes and sociodemographic characteristics within these subgroups. The results demonstrate the value of examining structure within heterogeneous public attitudes about education.