Annual Context: Overview

It’s important to consider the surrounding context when reviewing the survey results. We certainly cannot control for the influence of social, political, and cultural context, and we know little of participants’ individual contexts beyond the demographic information collected or their local contexts. However, having a sense of what was going on in the world and the US nation during the survey period helps contextualize the data as we try to make sense of the results. Context may provide partial explanations for participants’ perceptions of leadership, although causation cannot be claimed.  

Listed within the Annual Context menu for each survey year is our attempt to capture the main global and US national contextual factors that could have been on people’s minds during the survey periods, therefore having potentially influenced their responses. The lists are by no means comprehensive, and individuals will have experienced contextual factors differently. Further, any event that happens at a given time does not stand alone; everything that happens has a historical context playing in the background and other current contextual factors occurring simultaneously within the system.

For the 2019 and 2020 surveys, the language we used in the few questions that referred to a time period was “current” and “currently.” For example, one question read “In general, leaders in the United States are currently effective,” and another read “It is too risky to be a leader in the current social climate.” Thus, we did not encourage participants to think specifically of an annual period. Almost all questions did not specify a time period. Some participants may have been thinking of their response related to the exact moment, while others may have been reflecting somewhere between the past few weeks or months, while yet others may have been looking back on an entire year or more. Beginning in 2021 we began to encourage participants to focus their thinking specifically to the previous calendar year. For example, one question read “In general, leaders in the United States were effective during the year 2020,” and another read “It was too risky to be a leader considering the social climate in the year 2020.”

Sources for Contextual Factors:

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/19/us/2018-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/21/us/2019-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/us/2020-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/19/us/2021-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/08/us/2022-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/13/us/2023-in-review-fast-facts/index.html

https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-most-significant-world-events-2018

https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-most-significant-world-events-2019

https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-most-significant-world-events-2020

https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-most-significant-world-events-2021

https://www.cfr.org/blog/ten-most-significant-world-events-2022