Ryerson Project
Ryerson Project Item 103
I believe it is harder to build a middle-class life than it used to be.
American adults' average (mean) response was 8.81 on a scale of 0 (Disagree) to 10 (Agree). 240 responses have been collected (so far) from 2026-05-12 to 2026-09-17.
Descriptive Statistics
| Mean | 8.81 |
|---|---|
| Median | 9.00 |
| Standard deviation | 1.50 |
| N | 240 |
| Standard error | 0.097 |
All-Time Distribution
Comparison to Other Items
Based on all-time mean agreement, this item ranks 4 out of 135 qualifying items and is at the 97.8 percentile.
Qualifying items have 100 or more total observations. Higher means indicate more agreement and therefore a higher rank.
Monthly Trend
Observed Trend
Observations suggest unchanging agreement over the observed period, from 2026-05-12 to 2026-09-17. The estimated change over that period is -0.576 points on a 0 to 10 scale. Regression results place a 95% confidence interval around that observed-period change of [-1.365, 0.213].Regression table
The daily slope annualized over 365.25 days is -1.644 points per year, with a 95% confidence interval of [-3.895, 0.607]. This short-window annualized number is provided for reference, but the observed-period change above is the primary trend estimate.
Call:
lm(formula = response_value ~ days_since_start, data = model_data)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-6.5489 -0.8471 0.3093 1.1541 1.4871
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) 9.088924 0.217736 41.743 <2e-16 ***
days_since_start -0.004500 0.003128 -1.438 0.152
---
Signif. codes: 0 ‘***’ 0.001 ‘**’ 0.01 ‘*’ 0.05 ‘.’ 0.1 ‘ ’ 1
Residual standard error: 1.499 on 238 degrees of freedom
Multiple R-squared: 0.008619, Adjusted R-squared: 0.004453
F-statistic: 2.069 on 1 and 238 DF, p-value: 0.1516