Langer Research Associates today presented a study evaluating the predictive validity of the weekly Bloomberg® Consumer Comfort Index™ in relation to personal expenditures and stock market values. The paper found that the CCI improves the traditional model for predicting personal expenditures, and substantially outperforms a buy-and-hold strategy in a variety of hypothetical stock investments for the period tested.

The paper, presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Anaheim, California, is available here, the presentation slides are here and details on the CCI are here.

A national survey in Afghanistan finds a virtual dead heat in the presidential runoff election between Abdullah Abdullah and Ashraf Ghani, with sharp ethnic and regional differences among likely voters. But the poll also finds opportunity for substantial acceptance of the eventual outcome, with more than seven in 10 Afghans saying they’ll see whichever candidates wins as the country’s legitimate leader.

The survey was conducted by ACSOR-Surveys in Kabul, with analysis by Langer Research Associates. Details are available here, and the study will be presented this afternoon at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Anaheim, California.

We’re in the midst of providing a two-day seminar on applied research methods for the United Nations Department of Social and Economic Affairs at U.N. headquarters in New York. Christopher Weiss led a daylong session Tuesday introducing key concepts and research techniques. He’s returned today to cover effective communication with data, while Damla Ergun leads a concurrent short course on statistical analysis techniques. Gary Langer will close the session this afternoon with a presentation, “Dealing with Data,” on the goals, pitfalls and possibilities of data analysis.

Bloomberg Briefs published a p.1 report Tuesday on a study we’ve produced evaluating the utility of the Consumer Comfort Index in predicting personal expenditures and stock market changes. Our report, prepared for presentation at the annual conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research next week, is available here.

Our weekly Consumer Comfort Index with Bloomberg nicely anticipated this week’s improved employment data; in advance of those numbers the CCI this week reached its second-highest since early 2008. We’ve shown a very high long-term correlation of the CCI and employment, at .80, and at .84 with the CCI on a six-month lead. This week also marked our shift of the CCI to a rebased scale of 0-100 for greater ease of interpretation.

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.