While working at Wayne State University, she published several studies on public opinion among voters in the Detroit region regarding John F.
[1] After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Sigel conducted a survey of 1,349 children and adolescents to gauge the reaction of young people to the President's killing.
[4] The communications professor Timothy E. Cook commented that their view of engagement was unusually broad, encompassing not just the typical indicators of political attitudes but including emotional, cognitive, and behavioral features.
[4] Sigel and Hoskin argued that young people are driven to political involvement by a combination of their social status, personal characteristics, and the politicization of their environment.
The book made novel use of open-ended focus group interviews with 650 New Jersey residents[6] to understand how men and women perceived the state of gender relations while they were undergoing dramatic changes.
[8] Amidst contemporary discussions about both the rise of feminism and an early 1990s backlash against feminism, Sigel's interviews instead largely showed resignation among women in New Jersey, who were more willing to provide rationalizations for the gender dynamics of their environment than to convert experiences into political action, while the men she interviewed frequently provided justifications for the sexist patterns they observed.
[1] Sigel was also interested in German public opinion, stemming from her early experiences with political violence in Germany.