March 5, 2002
Report & Analysis · Other Poll Releases
ATHENS, Ga. - While Georgians rate their state high overall as a place to live, they feel a strong need for improvement in education, according to the Peach State Poll, a quarterly public opinion survey conducted by the University of Georgia's Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Nearly 4 of 5 state residents (79 percent) rate Georgia as an excellent (27 percent) or good (52 percent) place to live overall. However, a majority of residents (53 percent) rate Georgia as fair (33 percent) or poor (20 percent) as a place for providing good K-12 education. Education ranks second only to the economy as the most important problem facing the state, but it rates last among the qualities on which the poll asked Georgians to rate their state.
The poll also found that residents think the most important problems facing the state of Georgia is the economy. The poll, which was conducted from December 12-19, 2001, finds that a majority of Georgians (57 percent) think that the state's economy is getting worse. Respondents from the Atlanta metropolitan area were the most likely to express pessimism about the economy, with 61 percent saying it is getting worse. By comparison, a Gallup Poll (December 6-9, 2001) found 48 percent of U.S. citizens think the national economy is getting worse.
In September 2001, the Peach State Poll found that 21 percent of Georgians believed that the people of their state were worse off financially at that time than four years earlier; in the December Peach State Poll, 31 percent of all respondents - 37 percent of those from Atlanta - said the people of Georgia were financially worse off.
Other survey results:
· Concern about urban sprawl, which did not register on the September poll, was cited by 13 percent of Atlantans as the most important problem facing the state.
· Georgians rate their state highly as a place to retire and as a place for reasonably priced housing. Sixty-three percent rate Georgia excellent (19 percent) or good (44 percent) as a place to retire; 56 percent rate it excellent (14 percent) or good (42 percent) as a place to find reasonably priced housing.
· The ratings of the state as a place for reasonable priced housing, finding jobs, and as a good place to live differ sharply when considering the respondents' race; blacks rated Georgia significantly more negatively on these three qualities.
· Although a plurality of Georgians (43 percent) believe that crime has remained about the same over the last couple years, people living in rural counties are slightly more likely to say that crime has increased over this period.
· A majority of Georgians (53 percent) favor the use of capital punishment for convicted murders even when the option of life in prison is presented as an alternative. African-Americans, however, are far more likely to oppose the use of capital punishment, favoring life in prison by a margin of more than 2 to 1 when presented with the alternative.
These data are taken from the Peach State Poll conducted by the Carl Vinson Institute of Government between December 12 and December 19, 2001. The poll included 805 telephone interviews of randomly selected adults in Georgia. For a sample of this size, the margin of error at the 95 percent confidence level is +/- 3.5 percent.
