On October 24, 2024 I blogged about how In the tenth Chapman Survey of American Fears for 2024, public speaking only was ranked #59 of 85 fears at 29.0% There is a pdf article titled Chapman Survey of American Fears 2024 – Key Findings that contains the following statement:
“ ‘More interesting, really, than what is in the top 10 list, is how the overall level of fear changes. For example, in the 2015 survey, only the top one, Corrupt Government Officials, had more than 50% reported afraid or very afraid. By the time you get to 2018, all 10 are over 50%. Americans are more afraid of everything,’ said Ed Day, Associate Professor of Sociology.”
The above statement refers to percent and thus to more Americans being afraid, NOT Americans being more afraid. But, as shown above in 2018 there were 12 fears ranked at 50% or above. In 2019 there were 17. The number of fears rises sharply from 2016 to 2019. Then for 2020/2021 there only were 9, in 2022 there were 11, in 2023 there were only 7, and in 2024 there were 15. Similar trends (also shown above) appear when we look either at 40% or above, and 30% or above.
Their discussion of Corruption says:
“Since the inception of the Chapman Survey of American Fears, Fear of Corrupt Government Officials (hereafter, FOC) has been the leading fear Americans reported. That is a striking fact because the surveys have spanned a decade and three presidential administrations. In the tenth wave of the survey conducted in 2024, 65.2% of Americans said that they were afraid or very afraid of corrupt government officials up more than 5% since 2023. FOC peaked at 79.6% in 2020/2021 and then declined to current levels.”
See their graphic, to which I have added about the Trump administration.
Another article by Andre Mouchard (of the Orange County Register) published at MedicalExpress on October 28, 2024 is incorrectly titled Survey finds Americans more afraid today than at any time in history. It contains the following quotes:
“ ‘Fear is taking a larger and larger role in American life,’ said Chistopher Bader, a sociology professor at Chapman who has been involved in ‘American Fears’ since the beginning.
‘They’re afraid of more things than they used to be,’ he said.
‘And they’re more afraid of those things than they used to be.’….
But the overall number of fears (shown above) has ranged from 79 on 2016 to 97 in 2023. That number of questions asked is a choice made by investigators which varies, as does the sample size from about 1000 to 1500 (also shown above).
Also:
“ ‘Stranger danger is growing,’ Bader said, referring to data that shows Americans – once viewed as optimistic and welcoming – are increasingly afraid of people they don’t know.”
But strangers were ranked between 73rd and 91st in the surveys, as shown above. Further, the percent very afraid or afraid of strangers only ranged from 7% in 2018 to 16.7% in 2024.
What are Americans really more afraid of? To evaluate that we need to look at Fear Scores on a scale from one to four, where 1 = Not Afraid, 2 = Slightly Afraid, 3 = Afraid, and 4 = Very Afraid. I blogged about this back on October 30, 2015 in a post titled According to the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears, adults are slightly less than Afraid of federal government corruption and only Slightly Afraid of Public Speaking.
As shown above, the Fear Score for Corrupt Government Officials ranged from 2.611 in 2015 to 3.175 (more than Afraid) in 2020/21. The Fear Score for Public Speaking ranged from 1.909 in 2017 to 2.172 in 2022 (more than Slightly Afraid). And the Fear Score for Strangers only ranged from 1.488 in 2018 to 1.750 in 2024.
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