Media and political commentators have made broad use of our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll this week. Beyond ABC and the Post, we’ve seen pickup at Slate, Politico, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, the National Journal, PBS, USA Today. Forbes, The National Review, The New Yorker, RealClearPolitics, Fox News, UPI, The Philadelphia Inquirer, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Times. This Week, the Weekly Standard and many others.

There’s quite a kerfuffle going on in the world of big data, with a range of prominent articles in the past month suggesting it’s not the analytical holy grail it’s been made out to be. Taken together, these pieces suggest the start of a serious rethink of what big data can and can’t actually do. See our ABCNews.com blog post here.

There’s news on the publication front for three of our staff members, stemming from their academic work before joining Langer Research Associates:

• “The Impact of Neighborhood Park Access and Quality on Body Mass Index Among Adults in New York City,” co-authored by Christopher Weiss, has been published in the journal Preventive Medicine;
• Gregory Holyk’s 2013 Political Science Quarterly article, “Paper Tiger? Chinese Soft Power in East Asia,” has been selected to appear in an edited book on China’s emergence, “China’s Great Leap Outward: Hard and Soft Dimensions of a Rising Power,” published by the Academy of Political Science;
• “Mapping the Connections Between Politics and Morality: The Multiple Sociopolitical Orientations Involved in Moral Intuition,” co-authored by Damla Ergun, has been published in Political Psychology; and
• Another article of Ergun’s, “Opposition to Equality and Support for Tradition as Mediators of the Relationship Between Epistemic Motivation and System-Justifying Identifications,” appears in the January 2014 issue of Group Processes & Intergroup Relations.

Congratulations to all!

Our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll measuring attitudes on the Affordable Care Act is getting wide coverage on news outlets (beyond ABC and the Post) including the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, Bloomberg News, PBS NewsHour, Kaiser Health News, NBC News, CNN, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and others.

The Eagleton Center for Public Interest Polling at Rutgers University today released a report by Langer Research Associates evaluating its pre-election polling in New Jersey’s U.S. Senate and gubernatorial elections last fall. See Rutgers-Eagleton’s announcement of the study here, our report here and coverage by the Newark Star-Ledger, the Philadelphia Inquirer, NorthJersey.com and the Huffington Post.

Blue Shield of California Foundation has posted a new web page with links to the full complement of our 2013-14 survey reports for the Foundation on primary care redesign and the health care experiences of low-income Californians. See it here, and see details in the next item.

Langer Research Associates will lead a webinar with Blue Shield of California Foundation at 12 p.m. Pacific/3 p.m. Eastern on Thursday, March 13, to present strategies for safety-net healthcare facilities to navigate the newly competitive marketplace brought about by the Affordable Care Act.

Drawing on a series of statewide surveys of low-income Californians conducted for the Foundation since 2011, we’ll offer key takeaways describing the drivers of patient engagement and satisfaction, including the critical elements of continuity, connectedness and strong patient-provider relationships. We’ll outline 10 concrete steps health centers can take to succeed in attracting, retaining and best serving the needs of low-income patients.

The Bloomberg® Consumer Comfort Index™, a long-running weekly survey of U.S. consumer sentiment produced by Langer Research Associates, is newly available from Langer Research on a subscription basis.

Bloomberg continues to brand the index, cover it in its news reports and distribute CCI data to Bloomberg Professional Service subscribers. Subscription products available directly from Langer Research include our weekly analysis of CCI results, historical data for the index overall and among groups, historical subindex data among groups and respondent-level datasets for advanced analytical purposes.

Additionally, in response to user requests, this spring we will be rebasing the index on a scale 0 to 100, rather than the current -100 to +100. This rebasing, aimed at greater ease of interpretation, will be produced via a simple algorithm and applied retrospectively to all past CCI data.

The Consumer Comfort Index is a continuous, 28-year-old weekly measure of consumer sentiment. Branded by Bloomberg under agreement with Langer Research Associates since 2011, the index is closely followed for its high-frequency measurement of the American public’s economic attitudes, its long-term trend and its concurrent and predictive validity in relation to a variety of other economic indicators. Research indicates the CCI’s potential utility in a range of predictive modeling applications.

Learn more about the CCI here, and for details please contact info@langerresearch.com.

There’s been wide pickup of our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll in outlets (beyond ABC and the Post) including The New York Times, The Christian Science Monitor, PBS NewsHour, NBC, CNN (here and here), The Wall Street Journal, Politico (here and here), Huffington Post (here and here), Time, The Hill, The Wire, The San Francisco Examiner, the Chicago Sun-Times, The Washington Times, the National Journal, and by the inimitable Rush Limbaugh, among others.

Gary Langer appeared on Bloomberg TV’s “Street Smart” today to preview President Obama’s State of the Union address with Bloomberg’s Al Hunt, Douglas Holtz-Eakin of America Action Forum and hosts Trish Regan and Adam Johnson. See how we did… and who needs a haircut… here.

Our latest ABC News/Washington Post poll covers the president’s standings in advance of the State of the Union address, as well as the party’s positions in this midterm election year. See it here.