Surveys of public attitudes have increasingly been criticized for being superficial and too fragmented to sufficiently represent views comprehensively within a complex issue domain. Attitudes are often assessed without context, and the scope of these surveys tends to be relatively narrow. With these concerns in mind, we developed a survey of adults in the United States that incorporated an approach that looks comparatively and in-depth at sub-issues within a larger policy domain, thereby probing deeper into individuals' attitudes than typically found. Our emphasis is on energy issues. As debates over energy issues like hydraulic fracturing, oil exploration, gas prices, and renewable energy rage, it is increasingly important to accurately and fully evaluate public attitudes. We present the results of this survey and evaluate the benefits of utilizing a sub-issue comparative, deep-probing survey instrument. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.