Measuring Employment Sentiments and Social Inequality (MESSI)

Field Period: October 26, 2023 – November 27, 2023

Overview

The MESSI is a national survey of 5,000 American workers, designed to study what people think and feel about work and the quality of their financial conditions. But the MESSI also taps into a range of attitudes and perceptions about what Americans think that other Americans think and feel about their own jobs. The survey is the first to capture a range of what we call “perception glitches”—that is, the gap between how Americans describe the qualities of their own working life versus how they describe the qualities of the average or typical American worker. Most people personally evaluate their own conditions as better off than others.

Detailed Methodology

On behalf of Scott Schieman, the Principal Investigator and Director of the MESSI, YouGov interviewed 7,755 respondents who were then matched down to a sample of 5,000 to produce the final MESSI dataset. The respondents were matched to a sampling frame on gender, age, race, and education. The sampling frame is a representative sample of United States employed residents, based upon the American Community Survey (ACS) public use microdata file, public voter file records, the 2020 Current Population Survey (CPS) Voting and Registration supplements, the 2020 National Election Pool (NEP) exit poll, and the 2020 CES surveys, including demographics and 2020 presidential vote.

The matched cases were weighted to the sampling frame using propensity scores. The matched cases and the frame were combined and a logistic regression was estimated for inclusion in the frame. The propensity score function included age, gender, race/ethnicity, years of education, and region. The propensity scores were grouped into deciles of the estimated propensity score in the frame and post-stratified according to these deciles. The weights were then post-stratified on 2020 presidential vote choice, employment status (4-categories), as well as a four-way stratification of gender, age (4-categories), race (4-categories), and education (4-categories), to produce the final weight.