What Republicans Know

The most politically knowledgeable conservative Republicans, according to this report, are more likely to support Rick Santorum for the GOP nomination.  The most knowledgeable moderate Republicans?  They prefer Mitt Romney.  Wait!  What about Ron Paul?  According to the national survey by Fairleigh Dickinson University:

“Conservatives who are paying attention to current events are pleased with Santorum,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. “The opposite happens with Ron Paul.  The more conservatives pay attention, the less they like what they hear from him.”

Essentially, the more knowledgeable a Republican is, the more likely he or she is to gravitate toward a candidate that, arguably, makes sense given their ideological predispositions.   A lot of Paul's positions cut across traditional partisan and ideological boundaries, so it's logical (not to Paul fans, I admit) that the more knowledgeable a conservative Republican is, the less they like what he has to say.


And if you're a Romney fan, this isn't half bad news. After all, the most knowledgeable moderates prefer him, and once it gets to a general election that's where the real battle lies, for the moderate vote (though you could argue Romney will need to appeal more to conservatives than other GOPers may have to, and that's a plausible argument, plus's he's got to do well in today's primaries).

So here's the more complete report, and by complete I mean no real information on the kinds of knowledge or current events questions asked.  But there's some good stuff here if you like to have fun with data.  Take, for example, the following:

Conservative Republicans who were unable to answer any questions correctly and thus rank low on the knowledge scale have a 31% chance of supporting Romney, a 16% chance of supporting Paul, and a 19% chance of supporting Santorum.

In English, the less knowledgeable conservatives went with Romney.  Why?  Because the less knowledgeable you are, the more likely you are to be swayed by political advertising, various appeals, and even emotions.  Romney so far has outspent the others, so this makes sense.  Yes, Santorum makes more emotional appeals, but outside of cable news he's not getting quite the airtime that Romney gets through big spending.

Where People Learn About Food

It's not really a shocker, but a new survey says people rely not merely on the Internet for info about food and recipes and meals, but specifically on social media.

As it says:

Study results show almost half of consumers learn about food via social networking sites, such as Twitter and Facebook, and 40 percent learn about food via websites, apps or blogs. "Consumers used to rely on mom and family traditions for meal planning, but now search online for what to cook, without ever tasting or smelling," said Laurie Demeritt, president and COO at The Hartman Group. "Digital food selection is less of a sensory experience and more of a visual and rational process: What's on the label? What's in the recipe? Show me the picture!" 

Again, not so much a surprise as really kinda validating what we'd expect as the world changes.   There's a neat typology further down the article, breaking people into categories in how they use the Net for info about food and the like.  Worth a look.

Booze in the News

Here's a shocking lede:

A new study published in the journal Drug and Alcohol Review reveals that young people do not possess the knowledge or skills required to adhere to government guidelines for responsible alcohol consumption. 

Okay, not shocking if, like me, you happen to work work at a university whose students tend to be stagger their way to near the top of the annual "top party school" list.  The story above, based on survey work in England, found that for five of the seven knowledge questions, fewer than half of respondents gave the correct response.

The actual study is here.  A couple of things to note.  First, the authors do an excellent job with their title, following Hollander's Academic Title Rule.  That is, using titular colinicity, you put in something clever, followed by a colon, followed by what the study is about.  In this case:

My cup runneth over: Young people's lack of knowledge of low-risk drinking guidelines

See how it's done, children?

Second point, to really get at this, you have to read the full report.  Well, you don't, because I'm here to do the ugly work for you, especially in digging into how they measured (every pun intended) drinking knowledge.  It's pretty damn obscure.  Here's the main part from the study methodology:

Participants indicated what they believed to be: the volume (in mL) of pure ethanol in a ‘unit’; and government guidelines (in units) for maximum weekly intake for men and women, maximum daily intake for men and women, and binge drinking for men and women.The number of correct responses was recorded as a total knowledge score. Respondents used 5-point Likert scales anchored with the end-points ‘not at all’ and ‘extremely’ to indicate: how familiar they were with the concept of ‘units’; how useful they believed the concept of ‘units’ to be; and how useful it would be to have more information about ‘units’.

Respondents estimated the alcohol unit content of 10 drinks selected to cover different sized servings of three types of alcoholic drinks consumed by young people. Colour pictures of each drink were accompanied by brief descriptions: red wine: 250 mL large glass; red wine: 175 mL standard glass; regular strength beer: pint (568 mL); Stella Artois lager: 330 mL bottle; Stella Artois lager: 500 mL can; Carling lager: 440 mL can; Carlsberg lager: 275 mL bottle; mixed drink—for example vodka and tonic: pub measure; Smirnoff Ice mixed vodka drink: 275 mL bottle; spirit—for example whisky: 25 mL pub measure. Estimates were dichotomised as outside or within 10% of the actual alcohol unit content [9]. Participants were given a score denoting the proportion of estimates within this range.

Above sounds more complicated than it really was.  Essentially, how much booze is in these various drinks.  Get 10 percent off, you're coded as incorrect.  And a lot of answers were incorrect.

The takeaway?  When it comes to what people know, booze is one of those things they can get wrong.

TV is for Recognition, Print is for Recall

I wrote a few days ago about recall vs. recognition and the challenges of coding open-ended questions that attempt to measure a respondent's political knowledge.  Without repeating at length that post, let me just say that measures of recognition are a lot like those multiple choice tests we remember so well from school, while recall are more open-ended kinds of questions.

I am in the middle of a study that looks at how people differ in their ability to answer either recognition (closed-ended) questions versus recall (open-ended) questions.  As an example, I might ask you who is Speaker of the House and provide four possible answers, with the correct response (at the moment) of John Boehner included.  You'd be likely to either know it or, perhaps, recognize the right person from the list.  A recall version would simply ask what office is held by John Boehner?  It's a cognitively more difficult task, that last one, because you have to pull it from memory without any hints or help.

Okay, fine.  So how's the study looking?  Read through this, because it gets to something I find kinda interesting.

Early in, as expected, I find people are much better at answering the recognition versus the recall questions. 

In my John Boehner example above, for example, 70.4 percent correctly answered the recognition version, but only 49.1 percent correctly answered the recall version.  The same is true for Joe Biden as VP (94.8 percent on recognition, 83.2 percent on recall), John Roberts as Chief Justice (69.9 percent on recognition, 33.1 percent on recall), and David Cameron as Prime Minister of the U.K. (46.5 percent on recognition, 23.1 percent on recall).  These results are tentative.

So, why does this matter?  In part it matters from a methodology point of view in how we attempt to gauge what people know.  One method paints a dismal portrait of the public's knowledge, the other one that is less so dismal. 

But for me, the interesting issue is in how use of various media may lead to greater success on one versus the other.  For example, my underlying hypothesis is the ephemeral nature of television news (both in how news is presented and in how we tend to watch it) makes viewers more likely to do better on recognition questions as compared to recall questions. 

So far, my analysis supports this idea, even after statistical controls for a host of other likely factors (education, political interest, etc.).  I love it when data confirm a good theory.  It doesn't happen often enough, at least for me.

Interestingly, use of Internet news sites seems to be replacing the reading of the print newspaper as the single best media predictor of knowledge.  There's probably a study just in that topic.

More to the point, so far I'm finding that getting the news from Internet news sites is the only media exposure question that is associated with recall (open-ended) questions, while only television exposure is significantly associated with recognition (closed-ended) questions.  That's a great finding if it holds up to more scrutiny.  My models so far are fairly rigorous, but there's a lot of "under the hood" work to do before writing it all up and submitting the results to an academic publication.  Still, I'm hopeful.

The news here?  The medium in some ways remains the message.  It's about depth of processing and how the news is presented, but most of all it's about how people understand the world.  Relying on TV is great for recognizing someone, but not so great when it comes to pulling out a difficult piece of information from memory.  Nothing beats reading, and apparently news from the Internet is supplanting news from paper newspapers in this regard.

Revisited: Recall vs. Recognition

I've written quite a bit about the differences between recall and recognition when it comes to measuring political knowledge (see, for example, here).  I've also published research on the topic.  Well, I'm back.

First, a quick-and-dirty theory/methodology lesson.  Recognition tests are the ones we often see in survey research, such as "Who is the Vice-President?" and four choices given.  Recall questions are harder.  "Who is the Vice President?" with respondents required to generate a name from memory, that's a cognitively more challenging question. 

Case in point:  John Boehner, the Speaker of the House.

In some national data I am analyzing now, a random half of the respondents were asked to name the Speaker of the House and were provided four names (a recognition question).  The other half of respondents were provided the name John Boehner and asked "what job or political office does he now hold?"  That's recall. 

As you'd expect, fewer people got the recall question correct.

Only about half of those asked the harder recall question managed to identify Boehner as the Speaker of the House.  However, on the recognition question, 70 percent got it right.  I am still coding other similar questions (VP, for example), cleaning data, and then I'll turn my attention to the predictors of who gets the recall versus the recognition questions correct.  Setting aside a host of other likely predictors, based on theory, I expect respondents who rely more heavily on print media to do better on the recall question as compared to the recognition question.  In other words, I'm guessing (hypothesizing) that television news helps people with recognizing a political actor but not so much in free recall of his or her name (or office).

Anyone out there doing similar research, I'd love to hear from you.

I'll write a bit more on this as my research progresses, in part because it allows me to think aloud, in part because I'm curious as to whether others are also engaged in similar research.  There are several good recall vs. recognition studies out of advertising and marketing, but relatively few out of political science or political communication.

Being in the Minority ... Makes You Slow

He who hesitates ... must be in the minority.

This new study, at least from what I can tell from only the abstract, does a whole lot of things right.

1. First, it uses the first rule of crafting an academic title -- come up with something cover, toss in a colon, and finish with what the study is really all about.  In this case, the title was: "Hesitation Blues: Does Minority Opinion Status Lead to Delayed Responses?"  Titular colonicity at its best.
2. The study is also on a topic I really like, how those in the majority or the minority differ.  There's a long and storied history of this work that ranges from psychology to political science to, yes, even mass communication.
3. Plus it hits on a favorite theoretical area of mine, spiral of silence, or at least I think it does.  Hard to tell from only the abstract.
4. And finally, it uses a neat measurement scheme, in this case response latencies (academese for, best I can tell, how long it takes people to respond as either liking or disliking something.

As I write this at home, I cannot access the article, at least not without paying some obscenely high amount of money for a communications study.  I'll try again from the office, but this journal, Communication Research, is not all that user friendly when it comes to digital access. And the study doesn't seem to directly address what people know as much as it addresses how they respond to a stimuli based on their majority or minority status. 

Perhaps knowledge pops up as one of the "individual differences" found to moderate the effect.  In all, this appears to verify how being in the minority on an issue, long believed to influence people to not speak out as often, may have at its root a caution about speaking out that is measurable by very subtle methods.  Neat.

Knowledge and Acceptance

Here's a survey that essentially argues the more we know about something, the more accepting we are.  The something in this case is the "smart grid."  You probably know the "smart grid" best in terms of those "smart meters" they're sticking on houses to measure and help control power costs and consumption.

(as an aside, the wingnuts out there are convinced such smart meters are part of a UN plot to take over the world)

To get to the knowledge part, scroll down the story to the Knowledge is Key subhead.  The story tells us, for example, that "there is a strong correlation between basic knowledge and willingness to change behavior patterns to meet broad goals."  What it fails to tell us, of course, is how the hell they measured knowledge.  And there are other issues.  More on those in a moment.

More fun:  "However, this pattern is reversed in issues related to privacy. Here, the more knowledge consumers had about energy, the more concerned they were with privacy issues with home energy-usage data."

In Other Words:  the more people knew about the smart grid, the more they liked it but the more they worried about it too. 

In Other Words Part 2:  the more people knew about the smart grid, the more they could answer question about it in a direction that makes, let's face it, common sense.

And finally -- irony alert.  The folks who conducted the survey, IBM, also happen to sell technologies having to do with, yes, smart grids and smart meters.  With some rooting around I found this page that gives some of the survey details (an N of 15,000 across 15 countries).  Here's my favorite.  It looks as if part of the knowledge test involved whether the respondents had heard of smart grids, which in turn is (gasp!) associated with their attitudes toward smart grids.

Our final lesson?  Surveys of this type are designed to get the results you want, which in turn become press releases and web fodder and, eventually, uninteresting blog posts by myself.