I’m doing a research project on evaluating Communist party support in the context of the application of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, relating widespread support for policies with the relevant socialist theory. Anyway, while doing research I stumbled across this usage of K-means clustering to analyze the data and with this application of a data analysis tool, the support for the party, while still high, varies greatly from what is initially suggested from the surveys.
Looking at it I find some of the justifications they use for describing typologies a little fishy. The questions asked are whether or not you trust the CPC on a four point scale with 1 being not at all and 4 being high amounts of trust, with the second question being about support for the one party system using the same scale. In any case they use K Clustering to break these groups into the four possible typologies and cluster the two of the middle groups together under the justification that people can be “ambivalent”. However, this feels like unnecessary simplification of the clusters in order to present the “ambivalence” as being more varied than it is. Just because people might have incoherent views on the issue doesn’t mean they do and presenting the issue as that feels like it could be “gerrymandering” data. I’m completely open to my speculations and reservations being completely off base, this is very estranged from my major, but I thought I would ask her for some help in understanding it.
You guys are pretty smart sometimes 
The part I’m discussing occurs on page 56 where they begin to explain their statistics and methods.
Disclaimer, this is based on skimming. As far as survey analyses go it’s not horrible. If it were me I’d be asking why the two ambivalence categories are so different in size if they do represent a similar intensity, and the regression results suggest that people tend to support governments when they think the economy is doing well and corruption is low, an indication that the support question is more capturing a vibe than an indication of a person’s undergirding philosophy on the proper form of governance. I think the paper would be a lot stronger if it tried to tease out differences between weak supporters and weak dissenters. There’s some room for follow up here and the Asian Barometer data is publicly available for download so you can have a look at the questionnaire to see if he omitted any useful questions. Or do your own analyses, these things aren’t as hard as PoliSci profs try to make them look.