In a previous post about public perception of the Occupy Wall Street movement, we speculated on the factors contributing to the legitimacy of the protests. In an effort to acquire more concrete evidence, we conducted a survey for our readers to tell us about their opinions of Occupy Wall Street and what led them to those conclusions.

The majority of the responses showed that our readers supported the protests.

Among those supporters, however, it was split right down the middle as to whether or not they had felt that way from the beginning.

However, for the majority of those who claimed to have changed their minds since Occupy Wall Street began, it was more a case of the development of an opinion where there previously had not been one at all. More than twice as many people answered that their initial lack of an opinion became a positive one. The rest said they had changed their initially negative opinions for the better. Not one response indicated that the person had started off in support of the movement, but had since turned against it.

But when it came to which factors influenced any kind of change in opinion, we mostly missed the mark with our guesses in the original post. We suspected that the appearance of celebrities and unions, as well as the proliferation of the movement in other cities across the U.S., would affect public opinion as to the legitimacy of the efforts at Occupy Wall Street. Not one of our hypotheses was mentioned. Instead, respondents said it was the media coverage of the protests that mostly informed their opinions.

The few respondents who maintained that their opinion had either developed into a negative one or had been negative from the start said that the protesters’ lack of organization was a key reason.

The Occupy Wall Street movement aside, the majority of responses reflected support for protests in general – that they were an effective way to bring about change, mostly because of the attention they bring.

The personalization of an issue that protesters can bring was also referenced as a testament to the effectiveness of such demonstrations.

But would those people put their money where their mouth is and show up at a protest themselves? Most said they never had before, but would for the right cause. About half as many said they had been to protests before, including Occupy Wall Street. True to the American spirit, those who said they would never attend a protest because they thought it was a waste of time were in the minority.