In November of last year David Leonhardt, an economics writer for The New York Times, created an “interactive puzzle” that enabled readers to create a solution for reducing the federal deficit by $1.3 trillion (or therebouts) in 2030.  A variety of options involving either spending cuts or tax increases that reflected the recommendations of the deficit reduction commission were offered, along with the size of the reduction associated with each option.  Visitors to the puzzle simplyselected various options until they achieved the targeted reduction.

The options represented trade-offs, the simplest being that between cutting programs or raising revenues.  Someone has to suffer, and suffering was not evenly distributed across the options.  Nearly seven thousand Twitter users completed the puzzle, and Leonhardt has summarized the choices.  You might still be able to access the puzzle online at nytimes.com/weekinreview.

Leonhardt was able to group the solutions according to whether they seemed to consist mostly of spending cuts or a mix of spending cuts and tax increases.  He admits that the “sample” is not scientific and, given that it’s comprised of Twitter users, may skew young.  Unfortunately, no personal data was collected from those who completed the puzzle, so we’re left to speculate about the patterns of choices.  Perhaps a little data mining would shed some additional light on the clustering of responses. 

Even though this is not survey resarch in the way that we know it, there may be much value in using this type of puzzle to measure public opinion about the tough choices that the U.S. is facing.  The typical opinion survey might ask respondents whether they “favor” one course of action or another (“Do you favor spending cuts or tax increases for reducing the deficit?”).  The options presented in Leonhardt’s puzzle represent real policy choices, and the differences between them force you to consider the trade-offs you are willing to make.  While the choices were comprehensive, they were not contrived in the way that conjoint analysis structures choices; that might present a problem if we are trying to develop a model to predict or explain preferences.

There’s no reason this technique cannot be used with the same kinds of samples that we obtain for much online survey research.  Add a few demographic and political orientation questions and you have what I think could be a powerful way to capture the trade-offs that the public is willing to make.

Copyright 2011 by David G. Bakken.  All rights reserved.