A public opinion poll is a snapshot in time. To find a trend means asking the same question over time and comparing the results.

When it comes to the values that Americans hold dear, the latest poll conducted for The Wall Street Journal by the University of Chicago’s NORC appears to show a dramatic trend. Compared with four years ago, far fewer respondents said values like patriotism and religion were “very important” to them. The poll got a lot of attention – mostly laments for a nation supposedly in decline.

Take patriotism: Only 38% said it was very important, down from 60% in 2019. The same question elicited a 70% “very important” response in 1998. For religion, the decline was similar, if less precipitous: Thirty-nine percent said it was very important, down from 48% in 2019. In 1998, the proportion was 62%. Community involvement and having children were also deemed less important.

Certainly, a lot has happened in the last four years – a pandemic, racial justice protests, the attack on the U.S. Capitol, runaway inflation, war in Ukraine – to shake our belief in shared values and institutions. But the methodology used by NORC to test these beliefs may explain the trend more than any groundswell in opinion.

In 2019, NORC called people to elicit responses. This time it conducted the poll online. That can make a big difference in how people talk about their values, as Patrick Ruffini, a veteran GOP pollster, noted. We tend to be less of a curmudgeon with a live interviewer, while happily grousing in an anonymous online survey, which sullies an apples-to-apples comparison.

Does this mean that the latest poll is more accurate? Perhaps. Other longitudinal polling has found Americans to be increasingly pessimistic about the future and less trustful of each other.

But the NORC poll also revealed a bedrock of tolerance of those who are different from us. Asked about society’s acceptance of gay, lesbian, and bisexual people, only 29% of respondents said it had gone too far; the majority said it was about right or needed to go further. As for tolerance as a personal value, 58% said it was very important.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson describes the poll as showing “Americans advancing in the right direction, toward inclusion rather than exclusion.”