What People Know

2012-01-26T05:45:00.000-05:00

In a story sure to not surprise many women:

Men are more likely than women to develop mild cognitive impairment (MCI), with and without memory problems, researchers found.

Women have a higher rate of dementia but men, it seems, cannot "tolerate deficits as well as women," says the study. I suppose we have less cognitive capacity to draw on. The deficits for men, the story goes on to point out somewhat painfully, "are fatal."

Sheesh. Women go nuts at a greater rate then men, but if we go -- we go fast.

I'm doomed.

Bonus Post -- Women Better Than Men, in Buying Cars

2012-01-25T15:15:00.003-05:00

Just stumbled across this Time story that says women are better than men when it comes to major purchases, particularly cars. Had to pass it along.

Catch-All Wednesday

2012-01-25T10:47:00.005-05:00

Rather than dip deep into some scholarly research, instead today I'll throw at you a mix of stories out there in the Interwebs that touch in some way on what people know (er, or don't know) about various topics.

Gen Xers know the flu, or so says this story. This is part of the Study of American Youth, a gigantic set of data collected annually.

A bit of a stretch, but a survey about commercial kitchens and how little they know about first aid.

An even greater stretch, but perhaps my first time to write about Romania, people there don't really understand the term "lobbying," which I find to be an advantage for them.

And there ya go. And here I go, off to grade a million papers instead of messing with a blog.

Watch Colbert & Stewart. Learn Science Stuff

2012-01-23T10:46:00.001-05:00

I had a bit of fun with the headline, but this study essentially finds that attention to The Colbert Report and The Daily Show, those two Comedy Central programs, goes "hand-in-hand" with knowledge about science and the environment.

That's the lede. Now let's get into specifics.

The theoretical argument is the two programs are "gateway drugs" to other kinds of knowledge. Comedy programs reduce the "entry costs" to understanding complex topics like science and the environment, thus lead to greater exposure to such topics in other media. Unfortunately, the study is a single cross-sectional survey, so arguing causality here is impossible, a problem the authors readily note. But they do attempt to statistically control for other explanatory factors. How well this works (are science folks more likely to watch such programs in the first place?) is a matter of some debate, though the authors say they are reasonably confident that, for less educated respondents, "the causal arrow runs from satirical news exposure to science and environmental awareness."

It's a compelling argument, one of many emerging in this kind of research.

What People Know ... About Germs?

2012-01-18T15:19:00.000-05:00

According to this press release, moms and moms-to-be don't know as much as they should about germs.

No, not politicians. Germs. While similar, germs tend to not be bipedal and smile quite so much. The press release discusses a survey about what people know about germs and why it matters. The majority of moms got a "D" for their knowledge, which if they're like me they follow the three-second rule -- if you scoop something off the floor in three seconds or less, no germs got on it. They're slow, those germs.

According to the survey:

According to the survey, only about half of those surveyed (49% of new moms and 51% of expectant moms) correctly answered that germ hot spots should be disinfected at least once daily. And only about a third (32% of new moms and 35% of expectant moms) was aware that the changing table is the nursery's number one germ hotspot.

How someone could not know a changing table is germ central is beyond me.

Mormonism is the new Catholicism

2012-01-17T14:30:00.002-05:00

Instead of reading here, see my column at Like The Dew.

MLK

2012-01-16T10:08:00.000-05:00

It's Martin Luther King Day, a holiday, and I thought I'd invest a minute or two exploring what people know about MLK. Here's my favorite from 2007:

In a recent survey of college students on U.S. civic literacy,more than 81 percent knew that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wasexpressing hope for "racial justice and brotherhood" in hishistoric "I Have a Dream" speech.

That's the good news.

Most of the rest surveyed thought King was advocating theabolition of slavery.

Oops. Not that he wouldn't have advocated the abolition of slavery, if it still existed at that time in the U.S., but still, ya gotta wonder.

Beyond knowledge, we can also look at what people think about King. One good source is this 1999 poll that asked about the greatest people this past century. King finishes just behind Mother Teresa in the "admire most" score. As an aside, Bill Clinton wins in the "do not admire" contest -- in a landslide. A distant second is, um, Billy Graham?

Of course King's name comes up in a host of other ways, from the controversy over having a holiday in his honor to standard survey questions asking whether King's dream is alive today. There are too many of those to touch on here, especially when I should be prepping for tomorrow's classes.

What People Know About ... Tim Tebow?

2012-01-12T14:52:00.001-05:00

Yes, you read the headline above correctly -- I'm devoting precious blogging space to a quiz on what people know about the former Gator and now Denver Broncos QB. You can take the quiz, I'll skip it. But apparently, at least according to an ESPN survey, Tim Tebow is now the most popular athlete in America.

There are 17 questions. I can't imagine there being 17 facts worth knowing, but then again I'm biased. I'm at Georgia.

No doubt my colleague Kaye Sweetser can ace it.

Lying About Voting Intent

2012-01-11T10:52:00.000-05:00

When people say they're going to vote, do they really vote? Not according to this study (warning, not yet peer reviewed). Even worse, from a research standpoint, they find many who say they're not going to vote actually voted.

The study gets at the question a number of ways. One is simple. Look at who said they're gonna vote in a survey and then go to the courthouse and see if they actually voted (it's a public record whether or not you voted, but not who you voted for). They also used an experiment and some other approaches.

To summarize, these "surprisingly inaccurate self-predictions" are full of measurement error, which can lead to all kinds of problems when you rely on them to, oh, decide on "likely voters" in a horserace poll (this is "grossly inadequate," the authors say) or even as a measure of political interest, motivation, or intent in academic studies. The authors argue self-prediction is "far inferior to past vote history as a predictor of actual turnout."

Again, the caveat -- this manuscript is under review somewhere and has not as yet undergone a complete peer review. As such, take the results with a grain of salt until it's been vetted by folks who are serious about this stuff.

But, there's some fascinating discussion at the end of the paper about the psychological underpinnings of saying you're gonna vote and you don't, or to me even more fascinating, saying you're not gonna vote and you do it anyway. That latter, they argue, may in part be a function of frustration with the political process but among regular voters, the pull of Election Day is simply to much. So pollsters in particular may be losing important data with their traditional screening questions.

Who Knows More About Politics? Dems vs Republicans

2012-01-10T13:48:00.000-05:00

Every election cycle, or maybe every time a new poll comes out, someone asks who knows more about politics -- Democrats, or Republicans? A glance at the surveys produced by such excellent polling outfits as the Pew Center would lead you to believe Republicans know more than Democrats, at least by a little. For example, see the table below:

As the accompanying report tells us, GOPers did better than Dems on just three of the 11 questions asked, at least beyond the margin of error. Dems didn't outscore Republicans on any question beyond the margin of error, though it got a bit close on the obesity question.

So our conclusion is that Republicans are politically smarter than Democrats, at least a little? Maybe.

To test this conclusion, I plucked the three questions out of the data that demonstrated a Republican advantage (Republicans control House, source of electricity, reason for Wisconsin protests) and subjected them to a quick-and-dirty analysis that controlled for one obvious factor -- education.

It's an accepted truism in hundreds of academic studies that education remains the most persistent and significant predictor of what people know. The greater the formal education, the greater the political knowledge, at least in how it's measured in most polls.

So how'd it come out? Through the magic of multivariate analysis we find that if we enter education first in a logistic regression model, being a Republican (versus Democrat) still predicts greater knowledge in all three questions.

What part of Congress do Republicans control? In this question, even controlling for education, being a Republican makes you twice as likely to answer the question correctly.

What's the cause of the Wisconsin protests? Same analysis as above, being Republican makes you 1.5 times more likely to answer correctly.

On the primary source of electricity, same as the Wisconsin results, with GOPers 1.5 times more likely to be right.

Our takeaway? On certain questions, being Republican matters. Now on the control of the House, it's rather obvious why GOPers would do better -- the question asks what do Republicans control. Let's toss that one out. But the Wisconsin protests? You might argue Republicans did better there too given the nature of the controversy and how important it was to partisans, especially a Republican governor. Let it go too. But on energy and electricity? I can't think of any reasonable excuse for Republicans to outscore Democrats, at least in the nature of the question.

Our final takeaway? Republicans do a wee bit better on a few questions, most of them explained by the nature of the questions themselves, but controlling for education doesn't make these differences go away.

If I were scoring this, I'd call it mostly a tie, but with the slightest of nods toward the Republicans.

Post 1,000

2012-01-10T06:00:00.000-05:00

This is the 1,000th post to What People Know, which began over four years ago as an excuse to blog about stuff.

Sorry, I have nothing special planned. In fact, I'm simply going to treat this post like any other and point to some research I just found about the television drama The West Wing (that's The Left Wing for you conservative cynics) and its usefulness in teaching young people about civics.

Yes, the program has been off the air for quite some time. There's no telling exactly how long this manuscript bounced around various journals before finding a home. Indeed, I'm fairly positive I saw a version of this at some journal in the past given how many I read for.

As the authors note: "Even though the liberal argument tends to win out in the end, the show generally represents both sides of an issue, as evidenced in the “Take this Sabbath Day” episode." That's fine, and it was a helluva show whether you agreed with its politics or not, and the authors do make note of the limitations of such programming in teaching kids about government and politics. Still, they are optimistic about such programs as a way to engage students. As they say in their last graph:

We believe creative civics and government teachers can find a multitude of uses for The West Wing if they are willing take a risk and use film or television shows in a proactive way in their classrooms. At the very least, The West Wing presents students with a portrayal of politics that is more compelling and, in many ways, more authentic than what they see on television or uncover through traditional political instruction.

Jersey Shore Gals and, um, Political Knowledge

2012-01-09T13:53:00.000-05:00

I have never ever watched Jersey Shore, but here's Ellen putting them to the test.

My favorite. "What is a caucus?"

"You mean a part of the body?"

Wow.

All We Get is 20 Good Years?

2012-01-06T09:46:00.002-05:00

A new British study finds "The brain's ability to function can start to deteriorate as early as 45."

BBC version of story here.

As the father of two teenagers, I can definitely say the brain's ability to function at all probably doesn't begin until age 25. In other words, we've got about 20 good years of cognitive capabilities. Jeez.

Previous studies found the decline to begin at age 60. I'm okay with that. But being on the downside of 45, this new finding is damned depressing.

Then again, it explains, um, it explains something. What was I writing about? Ah hell...

Year in Review

2011-12-29T10:05:00.001-05:00

This is a quick holiday post to note the blog's year in review, the crunching of numbers and the most popular posts. According to my analytics:

Total number of unique visitors to the blog: 3,870
Tuesday, Nov. 15, was the blog's most popular day. The topic that day? What men think women know. No idea why.
The topic "cognitive mobilization" led most people here. Other important search topics were knowledge, emotion, titular colonicity, and recall and recognition.
Obviously more visitors came from the U.S. than anywhere else (3,006 visits), followed by the U.K., Canada, Netherlands, India, Australia, Philippines, Germany, and Brazil.
In all, 104 countries are represented.
In the U.S., Georgia is the most represented state, probably my own checks of the site plus that of a few colleagues and students. Next come California, New York, Texas, and Florida. All 50 states and D.C. are represented.
There were visits from 18 different cities in my home state of Tennessee. None from my hometown of Lawrenceburg. Sigh.
My visitors tended to use either Firefox or Internet Explorer. But a bunch used Chrome and Safari.
Related to above, the leading "network" was the UGA network as an Internet provider to visitors. But after that it gets into the various flavors of ways people get online. Second was Road Runner, followed by Comcast, Charter, Verizon, AT&T, and the University of Amsterdam (I reviewed some faculty research from there in a post and we kinda followed each other afterward).
In all, users from 1,589 different Internet providers accessed the blog.
I blogged the most this year in April (25 times). In all, not counting this post, I wrote 191 separate blog postings.

Entertainment as a Source of Political Information

2011-12-19T11:28:00.001-05:00

It's easy now to find studies that examine the blurring of politics and entertainment -- and the consequences on political participation and knowledge. Here's one I like from the recent issue of Parliamentary Affairs that finds that entertainment programming not only motivates and informs young citizens but that this effect in indirect, having to do with perceptions of "authenticity" of the source.

Interesting stuff. Oh, I also like the study because it cites me. Yeah, I'm shameless.

This study falls in that group of findings in which young people operate through "multiple norms of citizenship" (to quote Dalton), and reaching them simply through news is unlikely to be as successful as in previous generations. As the study above notes:

Young people like to see themselves as media savvy and discriminating cultural consumers. They are wary of anything that they deem to be fake or inauthentic or patronising. However, one of our respondents voiced the thought that the presentation of news could benefit from lessons learnt from entertainment culture: ‘I don’t enjoy watching the news because it’s just so depressing, but if politics was thrown into something like games ... then I would know more about it that way’

The journalism side of me, of course, cringes. The mass comm scholar side of me, unfortunately, nods in agreement. To summarize, Mary Poppins had it right all along, that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." In this case, the news and politics and public affairs, that's the medicine. The blurring of news and entertainment, that's the sugar.

The danger is our recipe being heavy in sugar and light in the stuff that's good for you. In the past I've called this my empty calorie hypothesis -- that people are tempted to fill up on soda and soft drinks and fast food. Empty calories (entertainment forms of news). They feel full, so they're less likely to consume the stuff (fruits, veggies, real news) that's good for them.

The power of choice, with an explosion of digital channels and web sites and a million other ways to entertain ourselves to death, has led to a lot of people finding it easier and easier to flee the news -- or to insist the news be more like the stuff they find entertaining in the first place. That leave us with a shrinking news audience, and with a soft audience that expects news to be, above all else, entertaining.

Mock Elections

2011-12-19T07:49:00.002-05:00

Remember school and those mock elections?

The good news -- turns out they do increase the political knowledge of students. The bad news -- turns out they don't really increase the likelihood of kids to vote when they're older.

So says a study of Canadian schoolkids, according to this story.

It gets worse.

In fact, the report suggests some elements of the program may actually “lead to decreases in certain outcomes – namely intention to vote, agreement that it is a civic duty to vote and confidence in expressing views about politics.”

I don't have the study details in front of me so I can't weigh its methodology and findings, and like a person quoted in the above story I find the results a bit surprising. Typically, getting someone to vote (mock or otherwise) kinda sorta trains them into voting. Get a young eligible voter to cast that first ballot and they are significantly more likely to vote again next time around.

This study suggests, at least for mock elections, at least in Canada, the conventional wisdom doesn't apply.

Millennials Predict an Obama Loss in 2012

2011-12-15T10:50:00.001-05:00

Just out -- a survey of millennials finds that more predict Barack Obama will lose in 2012 then will win.

According to the survey, 36 percent predict an Obama loss while 30 percent predict an Obama victory. A third are unsure.

What the hell's a millennial? Ages 18-29.

Here's the odd part (I'll explain in a minute). The sample of 2,028 millennials, while pessimistic about Obama's chances, supported him against either a generic "Republican" candidate or specific candidacies of Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Perry. In the horserace polling, Obama led by a significant amount, sometimes double digits, against his likely GOP opponents.

Why is this odd? Generally the candidate we prefer is the one we also tend to see as the likely winner. It's called wishful thinking. I've written before it before, including this recent column in my local newspaper. Read the column. It's good, dammit, and you'll have a grasp of the basics of the concept.

Wishful thinking is a persistent, pervasive effect, but younger respondents in this survey suggest there's some pessimistic aspect to their political beliefs that offsets wishful thinking. Cynicism? Skepticism? One clue, if you read the survey report, is a whole lot of young respondents, by a 4-to-1 margin, believe the country is headed in the wrong direction. If you think that, then you'd be likely to extend that to the probable winner of the 2012 presidential election.

In other words, you expect the worst.

There are some other reasons why millennials don't follow the typical pattern of predicting your own preferred candidate will win. Caring a great deal about an election outcome makes you more likely to engage in wishful thinking -- and this particular sample of younger citizens may be disengaged from the political process, therefore theoretically less likely to think, um, wishfully.

For you political junkies and methodological wonks, a pdf of the survey gives more details. If you dig down, you find some other possible clues for the disconnect between who millennials support and who they think will win. Question 50, for example, asks how enthusiastic they are about the upcoming election compared to 2008. Not surprisingly, only 18 percent said they are "more enthusiastic" and nearly a third say they are "less enthusiastic." That fits my argument above, that if you don't really care, you're less to be biased into seeing your own candidate as the likely winner.

Driving these less enthusiastic folks is a single word -- disappointment. In Question 51 are a number of kinds of disappointment (Obama's policies, partisanship, etc.). But it can be summed up nicely by that one word, disappointment. If I were a GOP consultant, I'd recommend this be my theme in 2012.

Facebook and the News

2011-12-09T08:40:00.001-05:00

People don't use Facebook for news.

Yes, shocking, but a recent study describes an online survey of 1,050 respondents, a mix of college students, faculty, and staff, from a "large Midwestern university" (The Ohio State University?) to find this heady mix of folks don't really use FB for news.

There's some interesting stuff here, once you get beyond the odd sample, especially the use of variables called Facebook Intensity (frequency of use, along with how much it's a part of your life) and Presence (number of friends and how often you post). We can quibble for hours with what these mean conceptually and whether methodologically the measures make sense together, but by using these variables in analysis some interesting results are produced.

Table A4, near the bottom, provides a multivariate analysis with the dependent variable being FB news use. The authors run the model in three steps. First, they entered sex and age. Both significantly predict FB news use (younger and female respondents were more likely to use it for news). Second, they entered FB Intensity and Presence. When that happens, the statistical contribution of age is no longer significant. The variables Intensity and Presence steal all the variance that was explained by age. Third, they enter some Life Satisfaction and Introversion into the model. The former is statistically significant, the latter not, and neither affect the other variables.

What can we make of this? It's tempting to say that it isn't so much age as it is your relationship with Facebook that explains your likelihood to use the social networking site to keep up with news. But if you look at the correlations, younger respondents report significantly higher Intensity and Presence scores. Those variables just do a better job of explaining news use than mere age, which is important to know, because it suggests our relationship with a social networking site is better predictor of how we use it than simply age.

Is Voting Futile? Survey says ...

2011-12-08T10:09:00.001-05:00

This new story discusses a recent study that finds, well, here's the lede:

OTTAWA– Canada’s dismal rates of voter turnout may be rooted in negative experienceswith politicians and public servants, according to a new report.

A Canadian thing? Hardly. But the report linked to above has a great title of its first chapter: Democracy's Great. It's The Politics I Hate.

I'm fairly certain you'd find the same result in the U.S.

There's long been a argument that voting is a ultimately an irrational act. According to the Downs Paradox, the cost of voting exceeds the benefits received. Costs come not in cash but in time spent keeping up, with making a decision, with getting to a polling place. Toss in the ugliness of partisan politics and there's little wonder many people not only tune out of the news but are also willing to skip voting altogether.

The study in question here is based on eight focus groups. The weakness of this methodology, of course, is a lack of generalizability. It's strength, though, lies in deep meaningful responses, a depth of knowledge you can't really get from surveys.

To sum up: people in the study were frustrated with the disconnect between the democracy they love and the politics they see.

Partisan hackery and a fragmented media marketplace are drawing down that reservoir of trust so vital in a democracy.

The reservoir, sorry to say, is running dry.

It's possible 2012 may break records, in the U.S., for lowest vote turnout in the modern age.

Favorite TV Shows: Democrats vs. Republicans

2011-12-07T09:30:00.001-05:00

You won't often see me write these words, but Entertainment Weekly has a fascinating column today about the favorite TV programs of Democrats and Republicans. Like in politics, they don't agree. And the differences really get to very different approaches to how they understand the world.

I don't want to repeat the list (use the link above), but the results are a bit scary if you're of a conservative or Republican state of mind. Sarcasm and what I'd call smarter (more highbrow?) TV appeals more to Dems (30 Rock, The Daily Show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia) while GOPers like a bit more lowbrow stuff (The Bachelor, Swamp Loggers, Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy). Both like reality TV programs, just different ones.

Thankfully, Republicans also like such good programming as Mythbusters -- funny given the two hosts appeared in the rally by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert (who Republicans don't like). And not all Dem choices are necessarily good TV (best bad examples, Glee and The View).

And there are a lot of programs listed I know nothing about, probably because I'm not as much of a TV guy as I used to be. Treme on HBO, for example. Dems love show about rebuilding a working class New Orleans neighborhood, but for Republicans it doesn't even show up statistically. Never seen it myself. Modern Family is supposed to be excellent but I've never seen it either. Dems love it, GOPers not as much.

On the story, you really want to click through to the second page because it moves from the partisan divide of favorites to the partisan divide of least favorites.

Republicans hate Weeds (understandable), South Park (ditto), Jersey Shore (who doesn't?), and The Walking Dead (which I don't get, with the Apocalypse and all).

Democrats hate Swamp Loggers (there's a show about logging in swamps? Why?), The Price is Right (okay, no Bob Barker), all of the "ghost" shows, The Ultimate Fighter (ya don't like it when people hit and kick people on the ground? C'mon!), and COPS (because, of course, you're against law and order).

I always tell my journalism students that you can tell a lot about a person by asking what television programs they watch or what magazines they read. Indeed, often at trials a lawyer will ask just that before agreeing for a person to serve on a jury. TV shows, unfortunately, tell a lot about the person -- such as if you watch American Idol or even worse, Dancing with the Stars, how smart can you really be?

But this EW column gets at the partisan divide in a completely different way. It's about worldviews. GOP/conservatives really like the gritty reality shows where people work, and work hard (logging in swamps). Democrats/liberals like more intellectual heft, or at least intellectual playfulness and sarcasm, a more white-collar touch to their shows (The Office). I did some worldview research back in my grad student days but a lot of that has passed me on by, but there's probably a good way to analyze these programming choices along those lines. Any budding mass comm scholars out there, get to it.

Fruity Knowledge. Veggies Too.

2011-12-06T08:28:00.001-05:00

Yes, this blog for four years has focused on political knowledge and especially the media's role in maintaining what people know. Sometimes, though, you gotta go elsewhere for content, dipping into the obscure and the arcane. Especially on slow news/academic days.

And that bring us to -- what Australians know about veggies and fruits.

Told ya. Obscure. Arcane. According to this story:

A new survey of young Australians has found one in two don't know how many servings of fruit and vegetables to eat in a day, and even fewer know the serving sizes of common fruit and vegetables.

Yes, the survey of a whopping 106 college students found only 54 percent "knew the recommended daily amounts of fruit and vegetables." This is the "first concrete evidence young Australians don't know their fruit and vegetable basics."

The boldface above, that's mine. Concrete? A survey of 106 college kids? I'm not saying I don't believe the results, I'm saying the methodological problems in such a small, narrow sample are enough to make me want to skip my fruit and veggies for the day. But there is some funny stuff here. Read below.

Some participants estimated the serving size of grapes to be just one grape, and others estimated the serving size for carrots to be the equivalent of 20 carrots, when it is 20 grapes and half a medium-sized carrot (or half a cup of chopped carrot).

Wow. I think we can all agree this qualifies as a major nutritional fail. Again, I agree the results are probably accurate, that college kids are clueless on this, but the way they got there, with such a small (random? hard to say) sample makes me wonder about just how "concrete" the results really are.

And thus ends our obscure, arcane, methodological moment.

Year in Review (of Twitter)

2011-12-05T11:04:00.001-05:00

You may or may not be addicted to Twitter, but the micro-blogging site has up its Year in Review that you may find interesting and just a little bit frightening. It's a lit of the hot topics on Twitter in 2011.

From a news standpoint, this "world news" category differs in important ways from the list of most searched via Bing and Yahoo (comparison here). Twitter is more international, which makes sense. Bing is the most U.S.-centric, again not a surprise.

Of the odder lists on the hot Twitter topics is the "food and drink" category. McLobster? Fried Kool-Aid? On "movies" #1 is Thor (not half bad), followed by movies ranging from mediocre to good. On music, you know it had to be that "Friday" song as most mentioned followed by people/bands best left ignored.

Keep in mind the Twitter list doesn't mean positive, it just means mentions. Hence the "Friday" song playing so prominently. Read the list yourself via the link above.

Top Cable News Programs (Fox, Fox, and Fox)

2011-12-02T09:25:00.001-05:00

Fox News dominates the top cable news program audience numbers, according to this HuffPo story. Hell, all Top Ten programs are on Fox News. Double hell, Papa Bear Bill O'Reilly is #1 and a rerun of his show is #9. The talking heads of CNN and MSNBC can't even beat reruns of O'Reilly.

But if you read the story, you'll see there's been a drop in the Fox audience and a rise in audience counts for the other networks. This may be a simple ceiling effect for Fox (the news audience is only so big and when you dominate, you can only really go down), or it may signal something more telling, such as Fox Fatigue. I doubt the latter, lean toward the former. As the GOP presidential nomination fight continues, it's hard for me to see Fox losing much in terms of audience.

The GOP Prez Race

2011-12-02T09:07:00.001-05:00

For political junkies it doesn't get much better than this -- the Republican nomination battle. Mitt Romney hangs in there to deal with one challenger after another (Michelle Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain, now Newt Gingrich).

My hacked-together chart below, based on CNN polling data, shows how Romney has largely held steady (small decline of late) from September to today. But look at Gingrich in red, feeding off the decline of the Cain Train as it feels the effects of the various accusations. Perry dropped after bad debate performances and his odds went down even more this week as he confused the voting age. Political junkies grab your popcorn, because this Romney-Gingrich fight is gonna be a good one.

Personality and Political Knowledge

2011-12-01T15:10:00.001-05:00

As a budding doctoral student I was trained in personality research from a heavy social psychological perspective (all hail Dr. Mary Ann Ferguson!). I moved on, but I've always found the topic fascinating. And as we all know, the Big 5 Personality Traits are a major focus of scholars and here's one study in American Politics Research that looks at these traits and how they line up with political interest and knowledge.

As an FYI, according to that source of all information (Wikipedia), the five traits are: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. You can look 'em up if you like.

Back to the study. It finds:

... that underlying personality traits affect whether people are attracted to political information and what types of information sources they are most likely to use. We find clear evidence that Openness and Emotional Stability are positively and strongly associated with interest in and knowledge of politics.

But it's not that simple. Although they found a positive relationship between Openness and watching TV news, "we find a negative relationship between this trait and watching local news programs." Why? These folks want diverse and challenging sources of information, the authors argue, and local TV news hardly qualifies as such.

Not surprisingly, they also find some interactions between ideology, the personality traits, and watching satirical faux news programs. This gets a bit complicated. Basically, Openness is more associated with being liberal and is positively associated with satire programs, while Conscientiousness, more associated with conservatism, is negatively associated with watching the same shows. As Table A6 in the study shows, these relationships disappear (Conscientiousness) or are moderated (Openness) with controls are included for ideology. Simply put, ideology steals much, if not all, of the variance explained by personality traits.

Still, it's a neat idea. Most political research fails to account for individual differences beyond party identification, internal efficacy, or, sometimes, authoritarianism. I'd love to see more of this kind of stuff.

Love Citizen Journalists

2011-11-29T13:05:00.001-05:00

The future of news? Forget iReporters. Colbert goes one up.

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Cheap Diffusion of Knowledge

2011-11-29T11:15:00.001-05:00

Let's reach back, way back, to The Westminster Magazine of 1785, to find discussion of newspapers and political knowledge:

I love the part "a road unknown to our neighbors" and diffusion of information at "a rate so cheap, as to be attainable by all." Meaning, of course, newspapers.

Cool.

Oh Canada

2011-11-29T08:52:00.001-05:00

Blame Canada's youth for crappy voter turnout. Or blame TV.

A story on a study (different story on same study here) found less attachment to political parties and less a sense of civic duty when it comes to voting as key for youth -- that and watching news on TV.

They also found that “there is … no clear evidence that the decline in youth turnout can be imputed to changes in the electoral context. The most plausible hypothesis is therefore that youth turnout is declining because of changes that have occurred among young citizens.”

But what young Canadians know, that does matter. As the story notes:

However, knowledge of the political scene in Canada was a strong determining factor in youth voting. Ninety per cent of youth voters who were able to correctly answer all three survey questions “used to assess political knowledge” actually voted, versus 24 per cent of youth who couldn’t answer any of them.

The Right Smile Wins?

2011-11-28T11:09:00.001-05:00

When it comes to political research, there's no factor we won't explore in hopes of finding a clue as to who wins and who loses. Party ID and policy stances, you bet.

But also how that smile.

A column from mid-November that I just found thanks to this report points to research suggesting how well a presidential candidate smiles can be the difference between being a winner and being a loser.

From the column:

According to research by Professor Albert Mehrabian of UCLA, how much we like a communicator depends on the “congruence” of three factors—words, tone of voice and non-verbal behavior. Fifty-five percent of what influences our judgment about that “fit” is non-verbal: the speaker’s eyes, face and an “attitude” that comes across in the body language.

I admit I'm largely unaware of this specific body of research, but it makes sense. In the column, Jon Kraushar breaks down the last several presidential elections and the "smile factor" of each. Read 'em yourself. Fascinating stuff. But, and this is a huge methodological but, I wonder whether the "smiles" and "grins" and "twinkle of the eye" are being fit to the data. In other words, we know how those past elections came out, so it's easy to fit our perceptions of those facial expressions to the results. What's this tell us about 2012? Nothing really. Kraushar notes:

The secret of a winning presidential smile isn’t just in the mouth. Presidents also smile with their eyes, showing inner warmth or an amused twinkle, for example. Voters can detect the difference between the verbal and non-verbal communication of a Happy Warrior versus an Unhappy Worrier.

When I picture Obama vs. Romney, I see a tie and maybe, just maybe, an edge to Romney. Obama vs. Gingrich? Obama twinkles more, has better body language, plus Gingrich scares small children when he smiles. But I admit this is merely my rather flawed and personal perception.

But any of us can play this game. So have fun comparing twinkles and body language. It may just matter.

Grrrrr. On Citations.

2011-11-22T11:10:00.001-05:00

This week I've finished reviewing two manuscripts for major journals (one mass comm, other polysci). Both manuscripts directly address an area I've already published in. Neither cited me. Grrr.

And more ironic, one was submitted to a journal in which I published the work a couple of years ago. Doh.

Which makes you wonder about either how carefully someone checks the literature or how well their choice of search engines or applications do in finding key studies (yeah, calling my work key. I can if I want to, so there!).

I can also end every graph with something in italics.

For fun -- and in a desperate need to stroke my own ego after the other two authors ignored me -- I checked to see who had cited me in the last few months. The journals include: Political Communication, Communication Studies, Public Opinion Quarterly, Communication Quarterly, Political Science and Politics, American Behavioral Scientist, Parliamentary Affairs, Communicatio (out of South Africa), the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs, and my favorite, the Chinese Journal of Communication. Plus a new book about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.

That's in the last few months. Luckily, as my college promotion committee pointed out, I don't really have a national or international reputation. No. Not at all. What a bunch of putzes.

What Fox Folks Know (or Don't Know)

2011-11-21T18:04:00.001-05:00

A study out today is getting a wee bit of attention as it suggests viewers of Fox News know less than those who don't watch news. Or, as the report says:

"Because of the controls for partisanship, we know these results are not just driven by Republicans or other groups being more likely to watch Fox News," said Dan Cassino, a professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson and an analyst for the PublicMind Poll. "Rather, the results show us that there is something about watching Fox News that leads people to do worse on these questions than those who don’t watch any news at all."

Let's establish a few important facts about this.

This is not a peer-reviewed study. That's important to keep in mind.
Despite #1 above, the report lays out the methodology and tables nicely, so let's not get persnickety about academic publishing.
The questions tended to be about international news. Especially on Egypt on Syria. Not Fox's strong point.
But, despite #3 above, some were on domestic issues.
Question K5 in the report baffles the hell out of me. It's about the Wall Street protesters are Democrats or Republicans (aren't they Independents, as one earlier study found? That's not a choice, just "other"). And there are negative scores. Weird. I finally figured them out, sorta kinda, but it shouldn't be that hard.
There are a lot more Dems or lean-Dems than GOPers and leaners. That's a bit odd at first, but these are folks in New Jersey, not a national sample.
And it's that last one, the fact it's folks from New Jersey, that makes the study of more narrow interest and utility.

All in all, kinda interesting. Not generalizable, and I might quibble with the questions and such, but it strikes me as a pro job with fascinating results.

Studies and Stories on Knowledge (this week)

2011-11-17T06:30:00.000-05:00

I have no major topic to write on, plus Thursday is a busy teaching day for me, so here's a compilation of various stories and studies that touch on what people know.

Text4Baby (which I'd never heard of) is a free service where you text to get info. A survey found the service helped participants to remember appointments and learn about health issues.

Are small businesses immune to security threats? Obviously not. But a survey found small biz managers exhibited knowledge of threats such as keystroke logging, distributed denial of service attacks, website vulnerabilities and targeted attacks, exactly half indicated they need not have concern about any of it. Essentially, they saw themselves as too small to attack.

There's always one I really don't understand, like this study that found how ill prepared health care folks are about genetic mutation testing. So am I. You get these great disconnects in research. As in: The surveys found that while 94 percent of physicians responded that they discuss genetic mutation testing with their patients, only 17 percent of lung cancer patients surveyed were aware of genetic mutation testing.

Here's a survey about ... there being too many surveys. Okay, only kinda, but this story touches on just that. As one guy said: But he warned saturating the market with potentially conflicting data could mean valuable information gets "lost in the noise." It can be confusing having so many different surveys," he said.

And finally, we end with death. Except boomers don't want to think about that, according to this story. An Associated Press-LifeGoesStrong.com poll found that 64 percent of boomers - those born between 1946 and 1964 - say they don't have a health care proxy or living will. Those documents would guide medical decisions should a patient be unable to communicate with doctors.

How News Orgs Use Twitter

2011-11-16T11:12:00.001-05:00

The Pew folks have a report out this week about how news organizations use Twitter. The Pew analysis finds Twitter is used "in limited ways-primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material. Both the sharing of outside content and engagement with followers are rare."

For fun, I looked at Pew's own Twitter feed. There are a lot of "Pews" (Pew Research, Pew Forum, etc.) and I'm not going to go all methodological and do an in-depth analysis, but of the first 10 Pew tweets I examined, nine point back to their own content. One references a Census report. Going deeper, none really have "engagement with followers" and probably 95 percent point back to their own stuff.

Just saying.

Which is fine. I'm only mildly picking at Pew, which does amazing work and whose data I use constantly in my own academic research. For me, Twitter is an RSS feed, a way to keep up with breaking news (AP, NYT, etc.), with journalism-oriented stuff (Pew, Poynter, etc.), and with some social media stuff (Mashable, etc.). Twitter is crap for "engagement." Conversations die quickly, unless they're heated flame-wars.

The report also notes news orgs don't use Twitter all that often to hunt for sources or stories. That's true, though I do see it. The AJC in my backyard, for example, has terrific tweets (maybe the best in the biz) and also will, at times, put out a call for someone to chat about their issues with driving or whatever the story of the day is.

So am I just being persnickety with Pew? Yeah, in a nice way. But when I saw the report, it struck me as funny since, best I can tell, this is exactly how Pew uses Twitter. And there's nothing wrong with that.

What Women Know ... About Fertility?

2011-11-15T13:03:00.001-05:00

According to a story on what women know about fertility:

The poll of 1,000 women ages 25 to 35 who had talked to doctors about fertility found that participants could correctly answer seven out of 10 basic questions less than half the time. The Fertility IQ 2011 Survey found that women were wrong most often about how long it takes to get pregnant — and about how much fertility declines at various ages.

First, lemme speak to the story's lede which, I have to admit, kinda creeps me out. Here it is:

From the outside, Holly Finn certainly looks fertile.

With shoulder-length dark hair, smooth skin and a slim but curvaceous figure, the San Francisco-area writer could be any young mom with a baby on her hip.

Wow. If I wrote that, it'd come across as sexual harassment. Or at least like I'm hitting on her. Or something.

I can't really find any methodology or even details about the survey, not even by the sponsoring organization's web site. Not that I'd be qualified to judge the quality of the questions, but it shouldn't be this difficult to find. Troublesome.

2012? Looks Like 1996, at least in Turnout

2011-11-15T11:19:00.001-05:00

My column here about how 2012 looks like 1996 -- in voter turnout.

Evangelicals and Romney

2011-11-10T16:06:00.001-05:00

Will Christian evangelicals vote for Mitt Romney, a Mormon? A Pew report out this week notes the following:

... a May 2011 Pew Research Center poll found that about one-third (34%) of white evangelical Protestants would be less likely to vote for a Mormon, echoing reservations that evangelical Republicans expressed about voting for a Mormon during the 2008 GOP primary campaign.

I'm not interested debating religion and politics. At least not at the moment (buy me a beer and we'll debate all ya want). I'm interested here in methodology. That is, who are these "evangelical Protestants" and how do we know they're "evangelical Protestants." For some of you, this is obvious stuff. For others, perhaps not so much.

I downloaded the raw Pew data to peek under the methodological hood, to see how they were identifying people as "white evangelical" or "white mainline" or "white Catholic." In the latter, the answer is obvious -- respondents answered the race question as "white" and the religious affiliation question as "Catholic" (see below). We should all utter a collective duh. Let me lay it out how Pew does this. Here's the main question:

What is your presentreligion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such asGreek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic,something else, or nothing in particular?

[INTERVIEWER:IF R VOLUNTEERS “nothing in particular, none, no religion, etc.” BEFOREREACHING END OF LIST, PROMPT WITH: And would you say that’s atheist, agnostic,or just nothing in particular?]

1 Protestant(Baptist, Methodist, Non-denominational, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Pentecostal,Episcopalian, Reformed, Church of Christ, Jehovah’s Witness, etc.)

2 RomanCatholic (Catholic)

3 Mormon(Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints/LDS)

4 Orthodox(Greek, Russian, or some other orthodox church)

5 Jewish(Judaism)

6 Muslim(Islam)

7 Buddhist

8 Hindu

9 Atheist(do not believe in God)

10 Agnostic(not sure if there is a God)

11 Somethingelse (SPECIFY:______)

12 Nothingin particular

13 Christian(VOL.)

14 Unitarian(Universalist) (VOL.)

99 Don'tKnow/Refused (VOL.)

Now as you can see, it's fairly obvious and on its face holds up pretty well in terms of validity. This allows us to categorize folks. Of interest here, of course, are Protestants. There are a number of ways to continue. The ANES and GSS approach to this question is often to burrow down to the level of your actual church denomination and then let scholars collapse respondents back into whatever scheme they want, deciding whether certain denominations are "evangelical" or "fundamentalist" or whatever. They're are actual lists for this. I have one somewhere that goes down so far and I've used it in the past.

But Pew uses a simpler method. Shortly after this question, they ask:

ASK IF CHRISTIAN(RELIG=1-4, 13 OR CHR=1):

BORN Would you describe yourself as a "bornagain" or evangelical Christian, or not?

1 Yes, would

2 No, would not

9 Don't know/Refused (VOL.)

While it's not certain, I suspect the folks at Pew take the first question I pasted in and combine it with the question just above to categorize folks as Protestant evangelicals. Toss in the race question and, kaboom, you're ready to rock and roll (er, methodologically speaking). But how does the Pew approach stack up with the other version? Not so terribly bad. There was a study that looked at the two approaches not so many years ago, I believe in POQ, though I can't for the life of me find it now, that found the straightforward question performed pretty well compared to burrowing down to the denomination level. Not perfect, because we don't know exactly what's going on in people's minds when asked that question above. My gut tells me the question above, the direct one, misses some people and undercounts the evangelicals.

So all in all, the Pew question isn't half bad and, to be honest, is much simpler and less expensive to ask, to code, and to analyze.

And Now for Something Completely Different

2011-11-10T08:28:00.001-05:00

The Pew Center's knowledge survey is well known, but they've done something completely different this time by adding visuals. As they say:

The new survey includes a mixture of standard multiple-choice items as well as questions that use photographs, maps and symbols. It was conducted completely online Sept. 30-Oct. 11, 2011, among a random sample of 1,168 adults by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press.

That's kinda interesting. It mixes photos of well known public figures, a couple of maps, an image or two, as well as standard political knowledge questions. Take the test. You'll get a random assortment of questions, not all of them, but I don't want to get into specifics because I'd prefer you took the test first.

I can say this: it's an interesting approach and one full of methodological and theoretical nuances. Are there really visual learners? The research says probably not. But folks who watch a lot of TV news, they may be more likely to correctly answer the image questions. Unfortunately the report doesn't address that, but it does tell us Republicans do better on a lot of the political and geography questions, at least compared to Democrats. This doesn't control statistically for education, etc., so it's not as meaningful as you might think. A table near the bottom does break it down by age and education. It's worth a look, but without a more multivariate approach, we can't really get at visual versus textual questions. But it's interesting to note that respondents with a high school education or less tended to do better on the visual versus the non-visual questions. Worth exploring further.

Oh, by the way, I answered all my questions correctly.

Cain Coverage Fair

2011-11-08T08:22:00.003-05:00

A new Pew survey finds more people think think coverage of Herman Cain has been fair as opposed to too tough or too easy. The tables give a nice example of people believing what they want to believe, with Dems more likely to buy into the Cain sexual harassment story and GOPers less likely to do so.

Are journalists and others obsessed with this story? Sure. It's easy news. It's got sex. It's got a guy high in the polls for a major party nomination. It's got sex. And did I mention sex? I should.

And here's a telling line from the report: "Among those critical of the press coverage, more say it has been too tough (24%) than too easy (14%) on Cain.”

Wishful Thinking in Presidential Elections

2011-11-02T08:29:00.004-04:00

Instead of reading me here, read me instead in this column about wishful thinking in elections.

Ignorance in New Zealand?

2011-10-31T15:40:00.005-04:00

A New Zealand news story reports:

Taranaki's students could have a lot riding on this month's election but they might not even know it, according to a recent survey which reveals their political ignorance.

Calling it "political ignorance" seems a bit strong to me. A lack of awareness, perhaps, but ignorance is over the top given only 20 percent didn't know an election was taking place. But for those of you budding methodology students out there, note this next graf:

The survey gauging the political knowledge of 32 Witt students shows more than half didn't know a referendum was being held alongside the election, while 62 per cent said they didn't understand the MMP system.

WTF? You're computing percentages of 32 students? Of 32 friggin students? If we're going to talk ignorance, let's talk ignorance of basic research methodology, let's talk Survey Sampling 101, let's talk ... oh, never mind.

Finally, the truly scary part -- the results "will form an academic paper," the story says.

Um, no -- not unless you're talking about in-depth interviews and rich data, not a mere survey of 32 kids.

The Seven (Awareness) Dwarves

2011-10-25T06:00:00.000-04:00

While the 2011 group of potential Republican nominees may make for great television, they're not doing so well when it comes to public recognition.

A new Pew Center report finds name recognition for the Seven GOP Dwarves is not up to par compared to previous years. Asked what candidates they can recall, 28 percent of U.S. adults managed Rick Perry and 27 percent recalled Mitt Romney. Not great, considering at about the same time four years ago 45 percent recalled Giuliani and 30 percent Romney. You'd think Romney would be doing better, at least in name recognition.

For Newt Gingrich fans -- good news. Only 1 percent recalled the former Speaker of the House in October 2007. This time around, he's up to 6 percent. Break out the champagne, but keep it cheap. He's still stuck in single digits.

Thank God for Rick Perry

2011-10-24T08:26:00.004-04:00

Republican presidential hopeful Gov. Rick Perry has come through for me -- raising subtle doubts about Barack Obama's birth certificate. I here I was, afraid the birthers were gone.

Why do I care? First, it's just so much fun, this whole birther thing. Second, I've done research on the birthers that is now sitting at an academic journal awaiting reviews. Any publicity about birthers, from a strictly personal point of view, is good publicity. Makes my research all the more relevant.

In other words, it's all about me me me.

Now if Donald Trump would only re-enter the race. Or Donald Duck. And that I'm-not-a-witch chick, too.

Religion and Science Knowledge

2011-10-20T10:52:00.001-04:00

An excellent blog post digs deep into General Social Science data to explore whether the religious are scientifically knowledgeable, or not. Also, interesting discussion below the post.

Debates and Persuasion

2011-10-18T10:58:00.001-04:00

Of those who have watched the GOP debates so far, about a third say seeing the candidates perform has changed their mind, so says a new report out from the fine folks at Pew.

But do debates really persuade? The results are mixed.

There is a huge body of work on political debates, and in that literature you'll find a lot of it devoted to the persuasive power of such debates on the public mind. To unfairly summarize all this work in a few sentences, the short answer is debates sometimes, but rarely, matter, at least at the presidential level. There are a few famous anecdotes (Nixon vs. Kennedy, or Ford freeing Poland), but for the most part debates don't move a lot of people one way or the other.

Most of the research focuses on the final big debates in a presidential election. Very little has been done to study debates at this stage, when members of the same political party are squabbling for the nomination.

The Pew report is really asking people whether they think their minds have been changed, not whether minds really were changed. That may seem more academic than practical, but you'd be wrong. There's a big difference between what people think they know and their actual knowledge. Yes, the correlation between the two at the aggregate level is positive and significant, but buried in those data are the folks who think they know a lot ... but don't. Also buried in the Pew data, I suspect, are those who think their minds were changed ... but weren't. As long as we're clear on what we mean by the questions we ask, no harm done.

2011-10-17T14:42:00.001-04:00

I'm a bit late getting to this one, but it's a report of an interesting study (abstract here) that finds:

Low-income youth are more apt to vote if they are involved in political activism, according to a new study that also notes the influence of friends and family.

This is a fairly understudied population -- hard to reach, hard to get to participate, and often with less political power (thus, less interest in those who pay for surveys and other forms of research).

Local Knowledge

2011-10-13T13:15:00.004-04:00

Here's an older post but a good hint of an upcoming Public Opinion Quarterly piece (pdf version here) that argues our assumptions of what people know are based on the narrow reliance of national politics at the expense of local politics. When you examine knowledge about local politics, a "slew of differences" emerge.

First, I love the word "slew." You so rarely get to use it in a sentence. Second, this makes an excellent point, though I'm not going to discuss it in detail until I see the final version in POQ, in case there are some changes. That said, I offer the following from the discussion section of the pdf above that discusses what the author found:

The first is that scholars may have overlooked evidence that the public as a whole is generally more competent than believed by not including citizens' local political knowledge in their work. The second is that, even if the public as a whole is not more competent, evidence of specialization by citizens across contexts may indicate that certain groups of citizens are more (or less) competent than previously thought.

The argument here is simple: we need to reconsider our assumptions on who tends to be competent and who tends not to be competent based on previous studies that rely largely on national data. "Different citizens are knowledgeable about different matters based on relevance, accessibility, and aptitude," writes Lee Shaker. After statistically controlling for a number of factors, "neither black respondents nor women knew less about local politics than their white, male counterparts - though they were less knowledgeable about national politics." That's a significant, and fascinating, finding. Plus, the advantages of education, so prominent in traditional national surveys, appear less important when examining local knowledge.

While a single study won't overturn everything we thought about the predictors of political knowledge, this one does raise some substantial questions and, best of all, challenges some assumptions.

Does What People Know Matter?

2011-10-12T12:16:00.000-04:00

Scholars have long argued that political knowledge matters. The more folks know, the more likely they are to participate in politics, to vote, and to make ideologically consistent choices. In other words, the more people know, the better they participate in a democracy.

Here's a study that looks at the question in a slightly different way. Unfortunately I don't have access to the complete study, at least not online, so we're forced to operate from the abstract. From what I read there is probably some sophisticated modeling going on, so maybe it's good I can't read the entire piece. Still, read the following:

Simulations of hypothetical electorates under different assumptions about the distribution of political knowledge show that while some citizens would change their votes if more knowledgeable, the primary effects of increasing voter knowledge is to raise turnout levels and to solidify preexisting vote tendencies. The few vote changes that result from increased political knowledge largely average out in aggregation.

In other words, the models suggest a more informed electorate wouldn't change how people vote but it would change how often they vote. That's good news -- if we could wave a magic wand and make people more knowledgeable. Too bad a sizable chunk of the electorate has tuned out of the news. We'd need that magic wand to improve the electorate. That, and perhaps better quality news.

And then there's this:

Increased turnout resulting from a more informed electorate, however, favors Democratic candidates in two of the four studied elections.

On the surface this seems at odds with the quote above. Not necessarily so, depending on how they modeled the data. It just suggests that a hunk of the electorate that doesn't vote but would be motivated to do so if suddenly more knowledgeable would tend to vote Democratic. This makes sense to anyone who has spent time deeply analyzing election data or just time spent as a journalist covering elections.

So Democrats, especially, would love to lay their hands on that magic wand.

PR Folks and Coffee

2011-09-30T10:51:00.000-04:00

According to this report, PR/marketing folks are the second most caffeinated profession.

Here's the full list:

1. Scientist/Lab Technician
2. Marketing/Public Relations Professional
3. Education Administrator
4. Editor/Writer
5. Healthcare Administrator
6. Physician
7. Food Preparer
8. Professor
9. Social Worker
10. Financial Professional
11. Personal Caretaker
12. Human Resources Benefits Coordinator
13. Nurse
14. Government Professional
15. Skilled Tradesperson (plumber, carpenter, etc)

I have my doubts.

First off, there's no real methodology reported except that it was based on a survey produced by Dunkin' Donuts and something called Careerbuilder. I'm guessing an online survey. I'm guessing non-random sample. I'm guessing a site that tends to be visited most often by, coincidentally, people in the jobs listed above. We do get this bit of methodological notation:

Through this year’s survey of 4,700 U.S. workers, Dunkin’ Donuts and CareerBuilder® learned that scientists/lab technicians need coffee the most to keep their workday running.

That's a helluva sample, 4,700 U.S. workers, but I'd love to know how they did it. Telephone? Or a SLOP (self-selected opinion poll)? Passenger pigeon?

Finally, cops. They're not even on the list. Nor firefighters. Maybe they fall in the "government professional" category, but I'd doubt that even more given it could also mean other governmental types.

And, obviously, I'm upset that "professor" finishes only #8. My colleagues need to step it up.

I can see PR/marketing folks finishing high on the list. I'd drink coffee -- laced with arsenic -- if I had to spend my day spinning. And lab technicians, it can get awfully dull in the lab if you're running the same set of experiments or assignments again and again. But I would have expected nurses to finish higher. Ah well, we can always quibble, but it's hard to do so when you don't have enough information to judge the quality of the survey itself.

NYT: Kinda Wrong

2011-09-28T12:31:00.001-04:00

There's a story today in the New York Times that offers the following hed:

Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds

Scary stuff. If it were true.

The study by the Southern Poverty Law Center does not examine student knowledge. Instead, it scores the states, on an A-to-F scale, on how well they incorporate "a body of knowledge that reflects what civil rights historians and educators consider core information about the civil rights movement."

That's not a measure of what students know. That's a measure of what states teach. While they're not mutually exclusive, nor are they the same thing.

And yet here's the NYT lede:

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem.

Unless I'm missing a section of the report, it does not directly address changes in what students know about the civil rights movement. The NYTimes article does note that scores on general history are pretty dismal in the U.S. and seem to be going down even more than other scores, such as math, but you cannot necessarily argue what we see above, that specific knowledge about civil rights has "deteriorated."

This may seem a petty difference, but I disagree. A state's stated "core" is often different than what teachers discuss in the classroom, so you have to ask about the validity of the measure here. But it's completely different to talk about what's in a core curriculum and what students actually know. Are the two correlated? No doubt. Are they conceptually the same thing? Absolutely not. And for accuracy's sake, the NYT and SPLC should try harder. The SPLC got it right in their conclusions, when they wrote: "As this report illustrates, states are failing to set high expectations for student knowledge about the civil rights movement."

For the graphically inclined, below is a map of how well state's did. My state, Georgia, got a "B," one of the few times we outscored others. You can also find the map here.

Local Matters Again?

2011-09-27T13:15:00.001-04:00

Buried deep in a new Pew poll's methodology section is a question about how often folks follow local news and compares 2011 results with previous years. Respondents were asked if they follow local news closely only when something important is happening or whether they follow it closely whether or not something important is happening.

The results are surprising and, to some, comforting. My message? Don't get comfortable quite yet.

According to the survey methods section, from 2002 to 2008, the percent of people who followed local news whether or not something important was happening hovered around 56 or 57 percent of U.S. respondents. In the current 2011 survey, 72 percent said they followed local news whether or not something important was happening.

Wow. That's a helluva jump.

I did a 2010 study in Newspaper Research Journal that used some of the same data but examined changes from 1998 to 2008. My results are somewhat different, odd since I used Pew data, but this may be a function of my analysis strategy. Let's assume my data are somewhat different. If so, the jump in the interest in local news demonstrated by the Pew report is stunning and, to me, while welcome -- also inexplicable. Without access to the raw data for comparison purposes, let's look instead at changes in some of the other questions over time to see if we can find an explanation.

The report includes a jump in "national" news interest (mid-50s most of the time to 68 percent in the latest report), which supports a change in local as well.

But, "international" interest doesn't follow the same trend. This one jumps around a lot, probably due to current events in that given year. Let's put it aside.

Here's my major methodological issue. In previous Pew surveys, the "local" question comes late in the instrument after many questions about specific media use. In the 2011 version, the "local" question comes quite early -- the sixth question asked. In 2008, as a comparison, it's the 77th question asked. It's possible these items were rotated in some random way, but if so I don't see it discussed. It's likely respondents were primed differently when "local" news is asked after a long list of potential media consumption habits. If I'm right, the jump is questionable, making comparisons across time problematic.

So we can't get to excited about the jump in local news interest, at least not until we find out whether it may be a methodological fluke rather than evidence of a sudden burning desire in the American public for local news.

Local News

2011-09-26T13:14:00.002-04:00

Being a journalism guy I've always had an interest in local news. In fact, one of my recent Newspaper Research Journal articles looked at the audience for local news over the past 10 years. Now comes a new Pew study that digs even deeper.

My own stuff found newspapers had a core print audience of people interested in local and community news, particularly local government news. Whether that audience is big enough to sustain a newspaper/online enterprise is a different matter, but this new Pew report suggests the interest in local has increased and newspapers play a key role, though people today use a mix of media to keep up with various kinds of local news. The chart below says it all, at least in where people go for specific local news.

But buried deep in the report is a suggestion of growing interest in local news. And, if you'll excuse the word play, is good news.

Bad Polling

2011-09-19T10:21:00.002-04:00

As readers know, I'm a constant critic of bad polling. Here's an excellent post that takes to task Maine's news media's reporting of just such a suspicious poll.

Who Do You Believe?

2011-09-16T16:01:00.000-04:00

There's a big report out today that examines high school students and their teachers.

The main topic is First Amendment attitudes, but it also includes interesting data about Internet use, including a question about trust of media sources. Asked if certain sources are "very truthful," high school students replied:

Newspapers: 31 percent
Television: 17 percent.
Internet: 9 percent
Social Network: 7 percent

Wow. Teachers gave similar results. See the report (pdf) and the table for Section 10.

What's fascinating is how much higher students scored newspapers as "very truthful" (31 percent) than did teachers (14 percent). The downside of this, of course, is students rarely read a newspaper. Perhaps if they did, they'd score it lower. We can't answer that from the data here, but they are hopeful from a print news perspective, which of course is the form of media most closely associated with learning about politics and public affairs.

HPV Knowledge

2011-09-15T10:55:00.001-04:00

The HPV vaccine has been in the news of late, so it seems useful to look at a little research on the topic that kinda sorta fits my blog's topic. In this case, research on what people know or think they know, and their attitudes toward, the vaccine.

Here's a study, abstract only, that examines the attitudes of gay and heterosexual men. They found gay men more accepting of the vaccine.

Another study finds moral beliefs play a big role among Asians in considering the vaccine.

Even in the U.S., among black college students, men are significantly less likely to have heard about the vaccine. Similar study here.

Indeed, studying college students on the topic appears to be a cottage industry. Here's one study that gets at knowledge.

Men and Testosterone

2011-09-13T08:30:00.003-04:00

As everyone has heard in the last day or so, research finds that a man's testosterone levels drop when he gets married. It also goes up when he gets divorced. While the research doesn't examine directly why this happens, though we can all take a good guess it has to do with mating. And the research fails to look at all the other ways a man's testosterone level can change even during a regular day.*

A pretty girl smiles at you at the coffee shop (testosterone up). You walk out with your coffee and get into your minivan (testosterone down). At the store you buy some vitamins (testosterone down)**. You also get some beer (testosterone up). You watch Antique Roadshow (testosterone down). And then you flip the channel and catch some Monday Night football (testosterone up). That night you have a glass of wine (testosterone down), the next night a glass of good single-malt Scotch (testosterone way up).

It's a vicious cycle we men must endure.

* None of this is based on any actual research.
** And if you buy Depends for yourself, testosterone way down.

What Wisconsinites Know ... about ethanol

2011-09-12T15:08:00.001-04:00

There's a survey out that measures what folks in Wisconsin think about ethanol. I know, your first response is who cares about Wisconsin and who really cares about ethanol. Get passed that. In a report about the research, down in the story, is a bit about what people know:

Respondents' actual knowledge about ethanol was also mixed. While ethanol does, in fact, burn cleaner than gasoline, only 53 percent believed this to be the case, while 41 percent thought the two were about the same and 6 percent believed ethanol burns dirtier that gasoline.

On a similar theme (that theme being what people in the frozen north think), there's this story about Canadians "befuddled about debt." As the lede reports:

There’s yet more evidence that Canadians are clueless about when they might realistically be free of debt. And the current low interest rate environment is to blame for that, according to consumer debt survey by Manulife Bank of Canada.

I find it strangely comforting when others are as confused as those of us in the U.S.

Or Wisconsin, which I'm told is somewhere in Canada.

Pop vs Soda vs Coke

2011-09-09T09:41:00.003-04:00

It's been a long time, in blog years at least, since I revisited this topic, but it's a good one so let's fondly recall the raging debate not about budget deficits and job creation but instead about something truly important -- how to correctly refer to a soft drink.

Below you'll see the map that looks at how people around the country refer to soft drinks (Coca-Cola, Pepsi, etc.). You can also go directly to the site (mislabeled popvssoda when we all know coke is the correct generic term) and read up on the methodology, see better choices on mapping, and so on. It's cool.

The red is coke and found mostly in the South. Blue is soda, used largely in the northeast. Green is pop and is found in the vast middle of the country. There's also a state-by-state table form of the data for the geeks among you.

Want to dig deeper? There's a map that breaks it down by U.S. counties, which I used for a 2008 column that correlated this data with presidential voting. My column is slow to load, at least for me, but you can read it here. And why wouldn't you?

I'm thinking of predicting the presidential primaries or 2012 election with these data. It takes a lot of work to pull off but might be worth a little statistical fun. I'll keep you posted and if I do it, it'll probably run on some online news site as well as here.

The label's geographic differences do roughly fit a cultural, or even ideological breakdown. Left and right coasts, they agree, and tend to be more liberal. The South is more conservative and therefore could never use the same term as those Yankees and Left Coast types. Folks in the upper Midwest, etc.? They gotta have their own thing too as representatives (or so they'd say) of real America.

But as a child of the South (grew up in Tennessee, have lived in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, and now Georgia), I can only refer to soft drinks as coke. Yes, even if it's a (ugh) Pepsi.

Unless of course we're talking about Sun-Drop, the greatest soft drink every made.

What Afghans Don't Know

2011-09-08T13:43:00.001-04:00

What is this 9/11 thing of which you speak? That may be the response of most Afghans, according to this Atlantic Wire mention of a Wall Street Journal story.

According to a survey of 15- to 30-year-old men in the two southern provinces where President Barack Obama sent the bulk of American surge troops, 92% of respondents said they didn't know about "this event which the foreigners call 9/11" after being read a three-paragraph description of the attacks.

They must really wonder what the hell we're doing there.

Anti-Science

2011-09-08T10:59:00.001-04:00

Why do certain people hate science?

A day after the leading contender for the Republican nomination to take on Barack Obama said he doubts all the science about global climate change, you have to wonder why mostly conservatives want to doubt science. Is it because they don't like the answers objective scientific scrutiny provides? Probably.

Which brings us to this excellent Forbes article from a week or so ago.

Anti-science ideology isn’t completely new in the U.S. — there is a dismaying history of irrational, pseudoscientific, or downright anti-scientific thinking and political culture here. But it seems to be gaining momentum — even as it runs counter to America’s scientific and technological strengths. Such strengths, in fact, underpin our economic and political strengths.

Leading GOPer Rick Perry stumbled badly last night in answering a question about global climate change. Despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, he's certain his take is the right one. "Galileo got outvoted for a spell," he said. Yes, Gov. Perry, except it was religious leaders, not scientists, who outvoted him. Perry may very well be the eventual nominee, but let's not put him in the high IQ category. This is a guy who managed a "D" in economics. At Texas A&M.

The Republican Party can do better. Not only better than Perry, who I think will not only win the nomination but also be a serious challenge to Obama, but the party can do better when it comes to science rather than attacking scientists. You don't like the answers? Find another job than public office.

Crazy People

2011-09-07T10:13:00.001-04:00

The American Community Survey is a vital tool by the Census folks to help us understand ourselves, how our demographics are changing, and even how we're doing economically. But then again, you get crazy people like this who really do need to buy a clue. I love his "supposedly randomly picked." Paranoid, much? Or just statistically challenged?

In this vent, are you truly required by law to respond? Oh yeah, just like the Census. As they note:

Yes. You are legally obligated to answer all the questions, as accurately as you can.

The relevant laws are Title 18 U.S.C Section 3571 and Section 3559, which amends Title 13 U.S.C. Section 221.

Your answers are important. As part of a sample, you represent many other people. Find out how each question helps your community, your state, and the federal government in questions in the form and why we ask.

I suppose you can argue that you only want to obey the laws you like. Then again, how can you dislike us knowing as much about ourselves as is possible? The data are all made public, for crying out loud. It's not as if they're collecting secret data on you, though I suppose for some folks they also see black helicopters flying around their house at night.

It's Survey Friday

2011-09-02T14:12:00.000-04:00

And now in honor of Friday (and my birthday) I give you my favorite surveys from today's news:

Divorcing couples in the U.K. are increasingly likely to hide assets.
Only one-in-five Americans use a meat thermometer to check the temperature of their burgers.
Half of sports enthusiasts don't known when to use ice or heat with their bumps and bruises.

On the divorce thing, of course I'm gonna hide assets. The key to the story above is people think it's happening more often than it used to. Probably so. On the meat one -- I just cook the hell out of a burger and assume I'm okay. On the sports thing ... got nothing for you. Try to avoid sports that don't include bending elbows and liquid consumption.

Have a helluva holiday weekend.

Health Knowledge

2011-09-01T08:50:00.002-04:00

A bit obscure, but here's a brief bit about what people know about their own health -- specifically about their cholesterol. Survey says: only a third know their own cholesterol level.

Shamefully, I don't know mine. At least not lately. The survey found only two-out-of-five know high levels can cause atherosclerosis (plaque buildup in the arteries). For you non-math majors, that means three folks out of five don't know this.

I did at least know that one (he said, sitting in his office chair, letting plaque build up).

What People Know -- about Energy (social media angle)

2011-08-31T10:29:00.000-04:00

When it comes to energy knowledge, says one study, consumers can be a bit dim.

Sorry, I shamelessly swiped that bad pun from this story. It continues:

IBM surveyed 10,000 people across 15 countries on consumers’ energy wants and needs. The survey found a sizable gap between what consumers know and what they should in order to benefit from smart grid energy initiatives designed to boost efficiency, cut waste and save money.

Some of the findings, easily available from the story itself, include that nearly a third of those surveyed had never heard of "dollar per kilowatt hour" and more than half didn't know if their utilities had a green energy program.

Here's a less-than-shocking finding -- money motivates people. But it's not the motivator it used to be. As the story notes (and this is important for you advertising and public relations folks):

The No. 1 single influence on the consumer was an insert in their energy bill. However, the combination of traditional media, social media and the opinions of friends and family outweighed the influence of a bill insert.

Yes, this is a rather specialized topic, but it easily falls in my territory of media and knowledge. I think that italicized graph above is rather important -- energy, or not. Social media matters now, especially when friends are making suggestions and recommendations because, let's face it, we often trust our family and friends first.

People Don't Lie (as much as we thought)

2011-08-30T13:31:00.000-04:00

My dad always told me people lie about three things: how often they vote, how often they went to church, and the gas mileage they get on their vehicle.

It's an accepted truism in the political science literature that survey respondents overestimate how often they vote. Studies in the past have attempted to gauge this by checking the voting records of survey respondents, with some success.

(as a matter of information for you budding public records access scholars, you can't tell how someone voted, but you can tell if they voted, at least in most states)

There's a new report out at the ANES web site in which the authors examined the voting records of their 2008 national survey sample (report pdf here). In surveys, the proportion of folks who say they voted is notoriously higher than the actual proportion of people who cast a ballot -- hence we know some folks are, to put it nicely, fudging. Or so we thought. See below.

In examining public records, the authors reported four findings:

Official government records "contain numerous errors" that makes voter validation difficult.
These errors differ widely from state to state.
How states report their data makes it tough to compare across states.
And here's the biggie -- "We found that for respondents whose government records can be identified, the records and self-reports show very high levels of agreement. This finding implies that overestimation of turnout rates by surveys is attributable to factors and processes other than respondent lying."

In other words, people aren't lying as much as we thought they were lying, and the gap between what people say in surveys about their voting habits may be due, in part, to crappy government record keeping. Sure, people still fudge, but the difference is partly attributable to lousy records.

This is comforting for scholars who use survey data to study voting turnout, though it kinds makes my dad's advice from above a bit out of date.

Eyewitnesses: The courts, and journalists

2011-08-25T12:13:00.000-04:00

The courts are turning a skeptical eye toward the "troubling lack of reliability" in eyewitness testimony. Should journalists do the same?

The New Jersey Supreme Court, for example, is making it easier for defendants to challenge eyewitness accounts. Here's a telling quote from a judge:

"From social science research to the review of actual police lineups, from laboratory experiments to DNA exonerations, the record proves that the possibility of mistaken identification is real. Indeed, it is now widely known that eyewitness misidentification is the leading cause of wrongful convictions across the country."

The U.S. Supreme Court has its own doubts. "Every year, more than 75,000 eyewitnesses identify suspects in criminal investigations," according to this NYTimes lede. "Those identifications are wrong about a third of the time, a pile of studies suggest."

If you're a reporter, your first response should be: "Oh, crap."

Journalists rush to crime scenes, to tragedies, to bars at happy hour. Eyewitnesses are sought out, quotes dutifully recorded, stories carefully crafted. Nothing beats being there, I always tell my journalism students, but if you can't be there nothing beats talking to someone who actually was there when an event occurred.

If the courts have some doubts about the quality of eyewitness accounts, shouldn't journalists share these doubts? Absolutely.

The easy solution is for a reporter to judge whether a description sounds right, smells right, and is corroborated by others on the scene. Even then, groupthink can kick in.

Cop reporters know this one. Rush to a crime scene in a less-than-savory neighborhood where maybe a cop shot someone, say a kid. All the witnesses share a similar story, and sometimes they're right, but sometimes they tell the story they want to believe or the story they think they saw -- versus what their eyes actually soaked up.

We're all flawed cognitive processors. We often see what we want to see in a situation, a finding confirmed by hundreds, if not thousands, of published psychology studies. Not only do we see what we want to see, we remember it in ways that fits our predispositions (racial, ethnic, religious, partisan, and all the rest).

If roughly a third of eyewitness accounts in court cases are wrong, is it possible roughly a third of our reported eyewitness accounts in news stories are also wrong? Perhaps. And that's enough to give most journalists pause. Take the extra time to make sure other eyewitnesses share the same story. Even then you may be wrong. But at least you made a good-faith effort to provide the best obtainable version of the truth.

Social Media, Sex, Drugs, and Rock 'n Roll

2011-08-24T13:10:00.000-04:00

Compared to teens who do not use social networks, teens who do are five times likelier to use tobacco, three times likelier to drink alcohol, and twice as likely to smoke marijuana, according to a new report getting splashed all over the Internet today.

And you always thought it just seemed people on Facebook, etc., are having more fun than you. They really are having more fun than you.

Images of teens on social media are "rampant" with booze pix, pot pix, and all the rest. Also tied to this, according to the report, is watching suggestive television.

There's little reason for me to repeat what you can easily see on the report itself. Here's also a good Chicago Tribune story on the same report.

What makes me curious, and honestly I don't want to dig so deeply in the methodology today, is who the hell are these teens who don't use social media? I strongly suspect we're not talking about a cause-and-effect relationship here, but rather the authors of the study failed to account for any number of third variables that may better explain the findings. This often happens when people who don't normally conduct research on the media try to conduct research on the media. They suck at it.

If you'd like to dig deeper, here's a pdf of the report.

Recycling and the News

2011-08-19T13:41:00.001-04:00

People who regularly read newspapers are more likely to -- Captain Obvious time -- say they recycle newspapers and other papers.

It's hardly surprising that people who regularly read a paper version of the newspaper are four times more likely to recycle paper, but how about recycling other things, like glass and plastic? Glad you asked.

Newspaper readers were four times more likely to recycle cans.
They were twice as likely to recycle glass.
And they were three times as likely to recycle plastic.

So reading the dead-tree version of a newspaper makes you an environmentally sensitive recycling type? I don't think the causality is that simple, but I wonder if being forced to do one leads you to also do the others.

To test this I constructed a quick-and-dirty logistic regression model to predict the likelihood to say you recycle paper. Note my italics on say. I have no doubt many overestimate such positive behaviors like voting, attending religious services, and yes -- recycling. But let's fight with the measurement we have. To predict recycling of paper I threw in some basic demographics like age, education, and the like. I threw in whether you're a strong Republican or strong Democrat. I included political knowledge. I threw in another recycling behavior, cans, as a control. And then I added reading the newspaper to model. Yeah, it's an ugly equation, but allow me have my geeky fun.

Below are the results, vastly simplified and stripped of statistics. Keep in mind this is a regression, meaning all these factors are statistically controlling for one another.

What does NOT predict recycling paper? Being a Republican or Democrat. In other words, your party affiliation doesn't really matter. I like that.

What does predict recycling paper? Just about everything, even controlling for each other. Older, more educated, higher income, non-black respondents all report higher recycling. Females more than males. The greater your political knowledge score, the more likely you recycle. And yes, recycling cans means you are 14 times more likely to also recycle paper. Even after controlling for all this -- regularly reading a print newspaper means you are more likely to recycle paper. Duh, I know, but kinda interesting nonetheless.

Yes, but what if you flip it? Does reading a print paper predict recycling cans? Oh yeah, it does. Not as strong a relationship, but statistically significant even after all the controls, including one about recycling paper.

Why?

I'm fairly sure it has something to do with good citizenship. That's roughly what I'm going to play with for a paper, not a blog entry, but that's going to take more time and won't include such quick-and-dirty analyses. You get roughly the same results if you replace print newspaper reading with watching television news. But you get no effect for those who read Internet news sites or blogs. This supports my working hypothesis that there's something different about mainstream news and how it promotes good citizenship. Be watching an academic journal near you for the results.

Biblical Orthodoxy

2011-08-15T15:00:00.000-04:00

A traditional survey question for those who study religion is to ask about people's perception of the Bible. Is it literally the word of God? Inspired by God but written by men? Or merely written by men and full of fables and fairy tales? Often we use this as a standalone measure or combine it with the "born-again Christian" question to create a measure of doctrinal orthodoxy.

Have beliefs about the Bible changed over time? Not so much.

Using Gallup data, we can see the following:

The question was first asked in 1976, with 38 percent professing a belief that the Bible is the literal word of God.
This climbed to 40 percent by 1980.
After this peak, it dropped as low as 27 percent and no higher than 34 percent over the next several years.
The latest poll, in May 2011, pegs it at 30 percent believing literally in the Bible.

Okay, but what about the fables and legends response? Any change there? There's been a slow, persistent growth in this position.

In 1976, only 13 percent believed the book is fables, legends, and moral precepts written by man.
This peaked at 22 percent thinking so by 2008.
It's now at 17 percent, according to the May 2011 survey.

What can we take away from this? Attitudes about the Bible remain relatively stable over the last 35 years, at least as measured by Gallup. Some change. Nothing dramatic, but I do think we're seeing a slow, modest shift to secularism, but it's one so small that current events can easily shift it one way or the other. The campaign of a couple of GOP candidates (Bachmann and Perry) will bring such views in full relief over the next several months. It'll be interesting to watch.

Religious Freedom

2011-08-15T12:17:00.000-04:00

It's the first day of classes, so little time to sit, think, and write. But there's a new report out by the fine folks at Pew on religious freedom:

Rising Restrictions on Religion, a recent report by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion and Public Life, finds that restrictions on religious beliefs and practices rose between mid-2006 and mid-2009 in 23 of the world’s 198 countries (12%), decreased in 12 countries (6%) and remained essentially unchanged in 163 countries (82%).

America's Most Hated Person

2011-08-12T20:29:00.000-04:00

No surprise who is #1 when it comes to most hated. Casey Anthony. But who comes next? Here's the results.

Casey Anthony
Spencer Pratt (who the hell is this?)
Octomom (Nadya Suleman)

What the Elderly Know ... about Gays

2011-08-12T13:13:00.000-04:00

In my never-ending struggle to bring you obscure and perhaps overlooked studies about what people know, I bring you this one. The lede:

A small but groundbreaking survey of seniors and caregivers at two facilities in the East Bay has revealed mostly positive attitudes toward lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender elders.

There are a few methodological issues here. The surveys are of 92 caregivers and 64 elders. That makes the margins of error at just over 9 for the larger sample and just over 11 for the smaller sample. And some folks don't get the difference between a sample and a census. Here's a line from the story:

Researchers acknowledged the survey likely doesn't reflect the full range of attitudes among staff members because it only represented 26 percent of the total 350-member workforce at the facilities who participated.

Twenty-six percent, that's impressive. The point is the sample size, not the proportion of the population.

There is an important finding:

Despite the low participation rate, responses did demonstrate that caregivers have little knowledge about how to deal with LGBT seniors or family members. Lavender Seniors will design training for administrators and front-line staff about bathing and other forms of personal assistance, as well as handling legal issues and communication with lesbian or gay partners of clients or their next of kin.

Election Knowledge

2011-08-11T11:53:00.000-04:00

Think you know a lot about electoral politics and straw polls and the like? Take this test at the Washington Post. I missed several.

Dogs and Cats, Living Together. Mass Hysteria.

2011-08-10T08:16:00.000-04:00

See my column in today's Athens Banner-Herald.

Do You Know a Scientist?

2011-08-09T13:48:00.000-04:00

Just a quick shoutout at this NYTimes story in the paper's science section. It's mostly about getting scientists involved in politics, but it does open with how little Americans know even about scientists.

I love this bit (the lede):

When asked to name a scientist, Americans are stumped. In one recent survey, the top choice, at 47 percent, was Einstein, who has been dead since 1955, and the next, at 23 percent, was “I don’t know.” In another survey, only 4 percent of respondents could name a living scientist.

Who Watches Faux News?

2011-08-07T22:26:00.002-04:00

Faux news -- and here I do not mean Fox News -- is generally considered satirical in nature. Ya know, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. There has been lots of research done, and quite a few trees killed, in discussing the impact these late-night programs have on news, on politics, and most especially on young voters. I've done a study or two myself. Die, tree, die. I was looking to see if anything new has cropped up of late and came across a new one.

I unfortunately do not have complete access to this study in Communication Monographs, so all I can do is briefly note the abstract. The good? Rather than rely on secondary analysis, the authors did their own statewide survey to find four variables did well in predicting political TV satire exposure: "age, exposure to satirical sitcoms, exposure to liberal cable news programming, and the newly explicated and operationalized Affinity for Political Humor scale."

So we don't have a lot to work with from the abstract above. Age makes sense, and I'm guessing the "exposure to satirical sitcoms" means that you're drawn to certain kinds of programming. Being liberal and watching liberal cable news, that makes sense too. And then we have a "newly explicated" scale that, I'm guessing, measures how much one likes, or responds to, political humor. I love individual differences research, so seeing a scale being developed to get at this, that warms my psychological heart. I will have to look this one up once I can get full access to the article.

I also came across this Communication Research Reports article that, best I can tell with access only to the abstract (sense my growing frustration?) argues that we cannot consider these late-night programs as monolithic, that Colbert and Stewart differ from all the other programs.

Now we all kinda know this, but it's important to systematically examine and establish these points. As the abstract notes:

Results suggest that viewing satire or parody has positive and significant effects on political participation through the mediator of political efficacy, as does viewing traditional TV news. However, this relationship is not borne out for viewers of traditional late-night comedy. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

That's fascinating stuff, the different relationships as pertaining to political participation. Somehow efficacy matters. While it's hard to tell from the abstract, I'm guessing that for differing levels of self efficacy we see different effects on political participation -- but only when it comes to news or parody faux news programs -- not traditional late-night comedy like Jay Leno.

We're All Good Drivers. Or so We Think

2011-08-03T18:27:00.000-04:00

We all believe we're better than average drivers, according to a new survey. What's wrong with this picture?

We're also mathematically challenged. After all, we can't all be better than average given the very definition of average.
The world is far too full of bad drivers for the above statement to be true.
I, on the other hand, am better than the average driver.

People often overestimate themselves, particularly on how much they know. Actual knowledge and perceived knowledge do correlate with one another. In other words, survey a thousand people and ask them questions to measure what they know and what they think they know and the two tend to be positively correlated. In general, those who tend to think they are more knowledgeable also happen to be more knowledgeable. But there are exceptions. It's where perceived knowledge outstrips actual knowledge that people get into trouble.

According to the story:

U.S. drivers believe their own driving knowledge, ability and safe driving habits are better than other drivers on the road, 64% rating themselves as “excellent” or “very good” while dishing out those high marks to only 22%t of other drivers their same age. Even among close friends only 29% of motorists ranked their buddies “excellent” or “very good” drivers.

We always overestimate (lie about) certain positive behaviors (voting, church attendance, gas mileage for our SUVs. We tend to underestimate our negative behaviors (eating at McDonald's, watching Sponge Bob, picking our nose). And when it comes to estimating the abilities of others? Well, we tend to underestimate the positive, overestimate the negative. Such is human nature.

So what's all this mean? In part it's based in self esteem. We want to feel good about our abilities and knowledge. We need to. I did not use "need" accidentally, because this is a major motivational factor in how we think about ourselves and our world. We see the same thing when asking people what they know about politics and what they think they know about politics. Certain kinds of news consumption (talk radio, for example) tends to increase our perceived knowledge but not really doing much for our actual knowledge. TV news has the same effect, but for those of the lowest educational level or knowledge, TV actually does help. This is a function of how TV tells stories and a function of those who tend to rely on TV and not print.

When it comes to driving, I'm not surprised by the result. But the story itself is quite interesting. Teen and senior drivers get rated the lowest, and that's no doubt true. It's worth a read and worth thinking about outside and beyond driving as a domain.

Wait, Wait, Lemme Tell You ...

2011-07-31T18:57:00.000-04:00

On the road but thought I'd pass on this link from the New York Times about the show Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me from NPR, which is of course a current events quiz show. Otherwise, I don't expect to be posting much this week.

Female Journalists and HPV Coverage

2011-07-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

We all know journalists help set the public's agenda. What reporters cover, people find more important. And when people see something as more important they act in very different ways -- from how they attend to the news to how they behave or support political action.

But does the gender of journalists make a difference?

Yes, at least in a recent Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly study that found "the presence of females as reporters and news executives in the newsroom affected news content related to women, such as coverage of the HPV vaccine." Examining data at the organizational and individual level, the authors found the more "gender-balanced" the newspaper, the more pominent the coverage of the HPV vaccine. Male-dominated newspapers relied more on official sources and less on people (teens, parents, teachers) as compared to more gender-diverse newspapers.

There are limitations to the study. There always are. But it's interesting that the gender makeup of a newsroom could so clearly influence the quantity of stories and how they were reported.

What we don't know, at least from this study, is whether the differences in coverage make a difference in the readers of these newspapers. It would be interesting to know whether, in different communities, there were fewer or more teenage girls getting vaccinated depending on such differences in coverage. When you extend data that far, things tend to unravel, but I'm guessing you might be able to tease out some significant behavioral effects.

Full cite: Teresa Correa and Dustin Harp (2011). Women matter in newsrooms: How power and critical mass relate to coverage of the HPV vaccine. Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, 88 (2), 801-319.

Trick Questions

2011-07-28T09:48:00.000-04:00

I caught a bit of video this morning of Newt Gingrich holding up a Newt 2012 t-shirt. He was set up, and nicely. The ABC reporter got him to hold up the shirt, which he gladly did for the camera, probably figuring it for a harmless puff pic. Gingrich is all about American jobs. Turns out, though, the shirt was made not in the U.S. -- but in El Salvador.

Newt, you've been punk'd.

"I'll have to ask the folks who ordered this," Gingrich responded. "I don't order it and I don't do it." Campaign spokesperson Michelle Selesky said "That was a rush order made by some of the volunteers." Selesky noted the print work on the shirts was done in Atlanta.

Okay, so Atlanta is kinda like America. So that's something.

This is nothing new. The traditional journalistic punking involves milk.

You may not know the routine, but reporters used to follow presidential candidates around as they try to portray themselves as caring about the common man. And then you ask him or her: "So, what's a gallon of milk cost?"

They struggle for an answer. They've been punk'd.

There more here than just catching a high rolling politico looking like a fool. They can do this by themselves quite well (remember Michael Dukakis doing the bobble-head doll routine in a tank, or John Kerry in hunting gear?). And then there was President George H. W. Bush being "amazed" by a grocery store scanner, something Americans see every day. Turns out that story is false, but it fit the narrative of a well-heeled Bush who didn't really understand Americans in a time of economic downturn.

My point?

In what people know, perception is powerful. We tend to see what we want to see and believe what we want to believe, but a powerful narrative that paints a candidate in a certain way, such as hypocritical -- as in the Gingrich t-shirt -- or as historically challenged -- as in Michelle Bachmann or Sarah Palin, has lasting impact on the public mind. And they are hard to reverse. Chevy Chase's biting imitation of Gerald Ford on Saturday Night Live may not have lost Ford the 1976 presidential race, but it certainly didn't help.

Research shows we tend to vote for presidential candidates based on two major themes: competence, and character. Other factors in how a race is framed, such as war or the economy, also play a huge role. But being perceived as a hypocrite or fool, those also can influence how people think about a candidate, and making every subsequent slip-up, even the most minor, seem huge by comparison.

Social Media as Public Opinion

2011-07-27T11:53:00.000-04:00

I wrote Monday and Tuesday about the promise and problems of using Twitter as a measure of public opinion. See those posts for a semi-detailed discussion of why it works and why it doesn't work, especially when it comes to the dangers for journalists tempted to use social media as a gauge of what people think.

But the politicians, they're already there.

According to a new study (full pdf here), nearly 64 percent of congressional offices consider Facebook and 42 percent consider Twitter as "somewhat important" or "very important" measures of public opinion. That's the soundbite, but like all soundbites it's misleading. Let's dig a bit deeper.

While 64 percent think Facebook is "somewhat" or "very" important, only 8 percent call it "very important" as a tool for "understanding constituents' views and opinions." Only 8 percent. The "somewhat" is a catch-all category, one people fall into almost by default. Also, I cannot easily find what the other response alternatives were, though I suspect they were "somewhat unimportant" and "not at all important." That would be standard.

And while 42 percent think Twitter is "somewhat" or "very" important, only 4 percent think it is "very important" as a gauge.

By comparison, 13 percent of respondents thought "paper surveys/polls" were very important and another 55 percent thought traditional polls were "somewhat important."

Even so questionable a measure of public opinion as online polls received higher marks than social media. Seven percent said online polls (slops) were very important, and 47 percent said they were somewhat important.

The takeaway? As my earlier posts discuss in more detail, Twitter has a lot of promise as a measure of public opinion, especially as we classically define it. But as a comparison to traditional, scientific polling and modern definitions of public opinion, Twitter and Facebook and other social media fall far short. At the moment, social media are just another tool, not unlike phone calls and letters to congressional offices, a way to take the pulse of a highly selective public.

So congressional staffers, and journalists, need to take care in how they interpret such data, even as we become more sophisticated in our methods of analyzing thousands and even millions of tweets.

Twitter II -- Is it Public Opinion?

2011-07-26T14:11:00.000-04:00

I wrote yesterday on whether Twitter qualifies as public opinion. I opened with an attack on the notion, one based on the methodological challenges of using the micro-blog as a measure of opinion. I then ended by suggesting that the earlier me was wrong, that Twitter may better resemble our classic understanding of the concept of public opinion.

Let me take a stab at following up on my defense of Twitter. At the end, I'll try to extend this from a philosophical concern to a more practical concern for journalists.

Before the existence of sophisticated polling, early thinkers had a very different understanding of public opinion. Its roots can be found in the coffee houses of England and the salons of France. In an 1820 letter, Sir Robert Peel complained about "that great compound of folly, weakness, prejudice, wrong feeling, right feeling, obstinacy and newspaper paragraphs, which is called public opinion."

Sounds like Twitter to me.

By this, I mean that early concepts of public opinion were based on the idea of communication. While I'm a poll guy and use survey data extensively, public opinion is more than merely what public opinion polls measure. Public opinion is an 18th Century invention, and at its heart is public discussion. It is, to borrow a phrase, an "organic sociological process" that takes part in the "public sphere."

As John Durham Peters writes in an excellent chapter that sums up much of this early thought, "in reading the newspapers, the public reads about itself, and thus finds ways to come into existence."

Take out newspapers, put in Twitter. It's a nice fit. After all, in Twitter people can talk back and forth, at "influentials" and others who fill the twittersphere. From this, theoretically at least, public opinion is a changing, ephemeral, difficult to grasp. And hard to measure. Polls are much easier. And thus, public opinion becomes, not what it was intended to be, but what became easier to measure.

Polls matter. Surveys are useful. Uncanny in predictive accuracy for elections, excellent as snapshots of what people think about a question asked of them at a specific time, they are filled with usefulness in their generalizability. I love 'em. Can't live without 'em. But as measures of the classical sense of public opinion, they fall desperately short.

Can Twitter be any better?

Snapshot counting of positive versus negative tweets falls into some of the same traps that polls do. All the million-tweet analyses cranked out by computer scientists do little to address what we really mean by public opinion. It's a difficult concept. As V. O. Key wrote: "to speak with precision about public opinion is a task not unlike coming to grips with the Holy Ghost."

To work, this will require significantly more sophisticated analysis techniques to tease out not the snapshot, but the tendrils of communication and change that occur as a topic or topics bounce across the twittersphere.

It's a methodological nightmare. But it's probably a better sense of what we truly mean by public opinion.

So, what's this mean for those in journalism?

Very soon we (the royal journalistic we) will face folks trying to sell us Twitter counting as an alternative to polls. Surveys are expensive, counting tweets -- less so. I suspect by 2012 we'll see some of the major players, the CNNs and New York Times of the world -- messing around with tweet counting either done in-house or, more likely, through consultants. As I discussed in detail in the previous day's post, doing so is full of problems. Yes, cheaper. And yes, above I argue it more closely resembles our classical understanding of what public opinion means. But from a practical standpoint, we simply are not there yet. My warning is this: journalists, be very very careful in using such data, if you use it at all, except in tandem with traditional polling data. Do NOT rely merely on tweets. We aren't there. Yet.

Can Twitter Measure Public Opinion?

2011-07-25T14:37:00.000-04:00

There's been a lot of interest lately in whether Twitter can be used successfully as a measure of public opinion. Certainly it's cheaper than a real survey, assuming you have the expertise to gather and analyze thousands, or hundreds of thousands, and yes even millions of tweets, as some scholars have done.

This matters not only for scholars, but journalists as well.

So far the results on Twitter are mixed. A German study found an analysis of tweets to be as good as polls in predicting a multi-party election. A million-tweet analysis found Twitter to be both good and not so good, depending on what you were analyzing, in a comparison with traditional U.S. polling data.

There are enormous difficulties in arriving at a suitable, valid, and reliable automated measure of sentiment from tweets. So often what we post is tongue-in-cheek, negative when we mean positive (or vice versa).

In other words, a million tweets may seem to have enormous predictive power. But size isn't everything.

Setting aside the problems with measurement error in any program that analyzes tweets as either positive or negative, let's not forget that while a sample of 100,000 or even a million seems impressive compared to traditional surveys of 1,000 respondents, we've seen big mistakes arise when we confuse the size of our sample with the quality of our sample. In other words, size doesn't always matter.

And for this, I remind you of the infamous 1936 Literary Digest poll.

You can read about it here, or here or a host of other places. The magazine was the Time of its period. The short version: this survey of over a million people predicted Alf Landon, a Republican, would win the 1936 presidential election. None of us remember studying the Landon administration in U.S. history class because, as you may have guessed, there never was a President Landon. Roosevelt won.

The magazine, using a method that had worked for it in the past, sent out over 10 million ballots, got over a million back, and called the election so very wrong. Why? Because a big sample is not the same as a good sample. This was 1936. It was the Depression. The magazine relied on its own subscription rolls, on those who owned cars, who had telephones, and host of other sources that all skewed toward folks during those terrible economic times who could afford such things -- people who tended to vote Republican. Thus, the mag predicted a Landon victory.

Size, then, doesn't always matter.

Twitter is like this. While I like Twitter and use it often, relatively few Americans make use of it, fewer still actively post to the micro-blog, and even if you can glean a million tweets on an election or public issue, the resulting sample is deeply skewed toward the geeky and those who like technology or just enjoy sharing with the world their daily wisdom. That's a lot of sampling error. And we're not even getting into the difficulty of having a computer program decide what's positive or negative in a 140-character-or-less posting.

There are a lot of interesting uses for Twitter -- how people respond in real-time to a television program or sporting event or even breaking news. As a measure, by itself, of public opinion? No. Unless, of course, you learned nothing from the Literary Digest. Journalists and scholars alike need to keep this in mind when using Twitter as the source of all knowledge, at least when it comes to evaluating what people think.

And now for my defense of Twitter -- as a measure of public opinion.

Yes, you read that right. While this deserves a more in-depth analysis than I can do here, Twitter in many ways resembles what we classically think of as public opinion. Since the 1940s or so, as polling technology grew more sophisticated, we've tended to define public opinion as that which public opinion polls measure. Circular, to be sure, a definition driven by polling methodology and not by sound theoretical reasoning.

The classical understanding of public opinion is more nuanced. It includes aspects of communication, something missing in our modern snapshot definition. In other words, people in the coffee houses of the 1700s discussing the issues of the day, a fluid understanding of opinion as it moved and changed due to not only what people thought but what they said, and how it moved and shifted. Thus -- Twitter. It fits this classical, versus the modern, understanding of public opinion.

As I said, my argument above deserves more time and all the usual academic citations we love to layer on our work, but the thesis is a simple one -- Twitter is an imperfect measure of public opinion, as we define it in modern times, but it may very well be the perfect measure of public opinion as we classically understand the concept: messy, fluid, and full of communication.

As journalists become more sophisticated in evaluating the Twitterverse for more than mere anecdotal evidence, they need to keep in mind the limitations of even a million tweets.

God's Approval Ratings

2011-07-22T09:03:00.000-04:00

Only 52 percent in a recent poll approve of the job God is doing. I feel a heckuva lot better about myself today, for some strange reason.

I heard about the PPP poll via The Atlantic Wire. If you download the actual report, you'll find that while 52 percent approve of God's job, only 9 percent disapprove and 40 percent -- well, those folks aren't sure. What's fun is not only the results of questions immediately below this but the results later in my post which break down the crosstabs, such as who gives God the highest marks -- men versus women, by age, by political partisanship. Read all the way through to get it. First, some of the other questions:

If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
its handling of natural disasters? 50 percent approve, 13 percent disapprove, 37 percent unsure.

If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
its handling of animals? 56 percent approve, 11 percent disapprove, 33 percent unsure.

If God exists, do you approve or disapprove of
its handling of creating the universe? 71 percent approve, 5 percent disapprove, 24 percent unsure.

Yeah, the use of "its" strikes me as either politically correct or gender safe. On the last one above, I'm not exactly sure how you can disapprove or be unsure about the whole creation thing, otherwise we wouldn't be here. I suppose you might quibble about certain aspects of creation, such as the color of the sky or the existence of light beer.

Further down in the report you can have a little fun with the crosstabs. Looking only at God's approval ratings, we find:

Among the "very liberal," 54 percent give God good job ratings. Among the "very conservative," 61 percent do. Not a huge difference.

Women gave God higher marks than men, 55 percent to 48 percent. Again, kinda close.

Republicans gave higher marks than Democrats, 55 percent to 50 percent. Ditto on close.

Blacks gave higher approval (72 percent) than Hispanics (53) and whites (47). That's a big difference, but the number of blacks in the survey may be so small as to raise methodological issues. Still, I'm not surprised by the difference.

And finally, to bury a lede, the older you were, the lower God's approval ratings. Among those 18-29, God got 67 percent aproval. The other age categories and approval ratings in parentheses were: 30-45 (61), 46-65 (50), older than 65 (40). I suppose as you get older, you have a little more to bitch about when it comes to God and the job, um, "its" doing.

Estimating Political Expertise and Fearing the "Passionate Fool"

2011-07-20T11:44:00.000-04:00

When we think someone knows what they're talking about, we quite logically pay more attention to what they say.

Guess someone's expertise correctly and we benefit from good advice. Guess wrong, we're screwed. This goes for health information, this goes for car repairs, and according to a new Political Behavior article, this goes for guessing the political expertise of people we speak to most often about politics.

Turns out, we're only so-so at guessing the expertise of others. According to the author:

This study presents a mixed picture of the public’s ability to identify credible information sources among those with whom they discuss politics. The good news is individuals are able to recognize expertise, but people do make mistakes and systematically overestimate the knowledge of some types of individuals and underestimate it in others.

When someone is passionate about politics we tend to overestimate their actual expertise. That's an understandable bias on our part. If someone cares deeply, they must be knowledgeable, right? Not necessarily.

We can also be overwhelmed by someone's emotion. The downside, writes study author John Barry Ryan, is "individuals do run the risk of believing those who are constantly talking, but without any real understanding of the topics about which they speak. It is the passionate fool who may disrupt effective political discussion."

So when it comes to who to trust about politics and public affairs, the message here seems to be to fear the passionate fool.

Full Study Cite: Ryan, J. B. (2011). Accuracy and bias in perceptions of political knowledge. Political Behavior, 33, 335-356.

U.S. Students and Geography

2011-07-19T13:34:00.000-04:00

A Chicago Trib story today reveals U.S. students have a "tenuous command" of basic geography, "including knowledge of the natural environment, how it shapes society and other cultures and countries."

Fewer than a quarter of high school seniors scored proficiently on the geography test, down from 25 percent in 2001 and 29 percent in 1994, when the national geography exam first was administered. The decline seen in the twelfth-grade scores was the most dramatic of any grade tested.

Ouch.

The funny thing is my daughter, an Honors student and scary smart, she sucks at geography. But even she would pass the exam above with flying colors.

Earlier this year we had civics and history scores and across all of them, high school seniors did the worst. Perhaps it's because a lot of this isn't part of the grand No Child Left Untested. Regardless of the cause, it's bad news.

Want a Job Researching Political Knowledge?

2011-07-18T19:40:00.000-04:00

There's an opening at Princeton for a post-doc to work with Marcus Prior, a political scientist who wrote an excellent book a few years ago entitled Post-Broadcast Democracy that sparked quite a few studies, including one of my own. Read it (I blogged about it here, with some lousy formatting for some reason, I think I was sitting at a Mac). The research program will be on "political motivations and the abilities of ordinary citizens." It continues:

The individual will work on a variety of projects which may include experimental research on political knowledge, analysis of panel survey data, and development of an original survey.

It's only for a year but has the potential for renewal, and it's a helluva opportunity for those out there wanting to get into political knowledge research and work with a really good scholar. You must have a PhD in hand. And live in New Jersey.

What Fish Know

2011-07-18T14:19:00.000-04:00

It's biology day here at the whatpeopleknow, so I'm shifting from people to fish. And not just any fish, but Poecilia mexicana, which sounds tasty, which is mentioned in this study with a cool title:

Male fish use prior knowledge about
rivals to adjust their mate choice

So let's applaud this fish for its use of knowledge, and for giving me something to write about today that involves knowledge.

The Internet Affects Memory?

2011-07-15T09:08:00.001-04:00

This NYTimes story reports on research that finds people, when they expect a computer to save information, are less likely to remember it. I wrote about this in 2009 and also here about Google making us stupid, but not in detail.

As the story says:

The subjects were significantly more likely to remember information if they thought they would not be able to find it later. “Participants did not make the effort to remember when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read,” the authors write.

This probably falls in the Google is Killing Our Brain category of studies. But this and other results from the study (read the article, it's quite short) suggest to me not a cause-and-effect from computers and the Internet, but rather the power of motivation in memory. I'm not motivated to remember if I think a computer -- or my wife -- is gonna do it for me. Less motivation = less deeper processing = less remembering of stuff. And that can have real consequences. More on that in a moment.

Here's where it gets kinda interesting:

The experiment explores an aspect of what is known as transactive memory — the notion that we rely on our family, friends and co-workers as well as reference material to store information for us.

Which is basically what we've been suggesting all along, and makes personal referrals and the wisdom of the crowd -- via Facebook or Twitter or Google+ -- an important change in the way we use memory and make decisions. There is strong research that suggests the referrals of friends carry more weight than other, even more authoritative, sources.

The downside?

Like a muscle, memory needs to be exercised. Sure, with mobile media we can always look something up. Google is but a peck of a smartphone away. But there's a hell of a lot to be said for having a base of knowledge to draw on. That base influences how we process new information, how we pick up on important changes, how we spot trends or subtle differences, indeed how we make sense of our world. The ability to look something up is neat and cool and convenient, but a heavy reliance on that ability may have dramatic negative affects as well, both in social knowledge but also political knowledge.

UPDATE: The Atlantic has a nice piece on this, just available. Strongly recommended.

A Summer of Case Studies

2011-07-14T10:44:00.001-04:00

Two major stories -- the Casey Anthony trial/verdict and the phone hacking scandal out of the U.K. -- make this seem a target rich summer when it comes to ethical case studies in journalism.

But are they of any real use for those of us who teaching journalism in the U.S.?

I don't think so.

Let's take the phone hacking story first. It's more of a Brit tabloid thing, this hacking into mobile phone mailboxes. Yes, we're nearly as celebrity crazed in the U.S. as they are in Great Britain, but the phone hack is a harder to pull off here and also we don't have quite the tabloid environment, despite TMZ and National Enquirer, found across the Atlantic. Maybe some of the News Corp's U.S. properties such as Fox News or the New York Post will get caught up in the storm, but I doubt it. Short of that, this makes the phone hacking story an interesting one when teaching a basic or advanced news reporting class, but one hard to connect to the day-to-day activities of most working journalists.

In fairness, there are aspects to invasion of privacy that may make for good material. And I suspect I could take the phone hacking and extend it to social media in some way, looking for parallels for the students to grab at and understand, but even that may be a reach.

Extreme cases are fun to discuss in class, but in the end their utility is meager.

Speaking of extreme, we also have the Casey Anthony trial and the verdict and this Sunday her release from jail. Now this is the kind of case we may can use when discussing how not to go overboard with a story (hear that, Nancy Grace?). About the only real lesson here, for basic or even advanced students, is to avoid taking a side in a major trial and using sources on air or in a story that perpetuate your point of view. Also, it raises questions about feeding public anger, which is what cable TV now seems to be all about.

This one has more utility. Only a little, but more.

The case allows me the prof to talk about covering controversial trials, about how to handle sensitive information, but most of all the Anthony story is a case study in how a media frenzy can begin, can be fueled by TV talking heads, and how it's hard to keep the news proportional while also being comprehensive. The power of social media, particularly Twitter, fits well here.

All in all, though, the trial/verdict is not a terribly useful case study for reporting classes. Most reasonable people know the coverage, especially on cable television and most especially on Headline News, went off into journalistic Neverland. At best, other than some social media aspects, a brief mention in class as a cautionary tale is about all the Anthony case deserves.

Unless of course my students want to be the next Nancy Grace. Then I'll ask them to leave the room.

Casey Anthony and the News

2011-07-13T10:29:00.000-04:00

Just when you thought the nightmare might be over, the fine folks at Pew put out a really useful analysis of news coverage and interest in the trial of She Who Must Not Be Named (except in the title above, thus attracting web traffic and building my brand and all that other social networking crud). Check the Pew study yourself rather than have me shamelessly lift their content here, Huffpost-like. But there are a couple of key points I'd like to make note of and then comment on.

Nearly half of those surveyed said news organizations had been fair in the coverage of She Who Must Not Be Named. Only 20 percent thought coverage had been unfair. Thirty-one percent of respondents (apparently dead) had no opinion. I'd love to see a breakdown of this question by the news network or social media consumed.

Lots of folks heard/read about you-know-who via social media -- 40 percent said "a lot" and, frankly, that's an awful lot. I admit it, I heard about the verdict via Twitter and immediately called my wife.

Actual coverage of the who-know-who trial was high, so high it tied coverage of the national debt. It may have felt like it was all her trial, all the time, but both stories tied at 17 percent of coverage. I'm betting the numbers on HLN were, ahem, somewhat different.

But actual coverage is different than actual interest by real folks. In this, She Who Must Not Be Named dominated coverage. Far dominated, at 37 percent compared to 17 percent on the economy. Nothing like a big trial to take our collective minds off a lousy economic situation.

Running for Office? You Better Look the Part

2011-07-12T08:15:00.000-04:00

Got plans on being the next big thing in politics? You gotta look the part.

An article in the latest Time, elaborating on research published in the American Journal of Political Science, discusses how people infer vitally important personality traits about a candidate from the face alone. What traits? The ones that tend to matter in elections, such as competence, honesty, trustworthiness, intelligence, etc.

And yes, there is a knowledge angle. Here's a graph from the Time piece:

They combined data about voters in the 2006 elections—including their vote choice, political knowledge and TV exposure—with data about the candidates' faces, specifically ratings people gave about how "competent" the candidates were based on looks alone. All told, they analyzed 35 gubernatorial races and 29 Senate races, and they found that "low-knowledge individuals" who watched above-average amounts of TV were about six times more likely to vote for the more competent-looking person than those who watched little TV. They were also much more susceptible than those who had "high-knowledge" of politics. (The Onion headline for this rather unsurprising find would likely read "Ignorant Couch Potatoes Less Likely To Make Thoughtful Decisions.")

Those of you steeped in persuasion or processing theories such as the Elaboration Likelihood Model will of course not be surprised by the findings. "Low-knowledge individuals" tend to be those who are less motivated and less able to deal with information, so they're more likely to use shortcuts to make sense of politics. In social science we call these heurstics, or cues. Basically, they make life easier for those who either don't care or aren't able to deeply consider a situation or issue (or here, a candidate).

As the authors say in their abstract: "we find that appealing-looking politicians benefit disproportionately from television exposure, primarily among less knowledgeable individuals."

All I can say is it's a good thing I didn't go into politics. Got a face for radio, and a voice for newspapers.

Numbers in a Story Increase Credibility

2011-07-11T10:43:00.001-04:00

Writing a news story with numbers is a balancing act. I do a whole lecture on writing with numbers, so important is the topic. Do you go for precision? Or do you instead rely on broader terms, like "most" or "half" or some similar shorthand?

For most pros the answer is somewhere in the middle. Lead with the summary words for readability and then follow with the precise numbers. An experiment reported in the latest Newspaper Research Journal looks at words versus numbers and what it means for perceived credibility of the news stories. The result? Hardly surprising. Using numbers instead of broad terms does indeed increase the perceived credibility of the various articles.

For most pros this is not an either-or choice. You might lede by saying the majority of Americans think this way or four-out-of-five Americans think that way and then you'd come back, fairly early on, with specific numbers. But in these Twitter times, when news can be condensed to 140 characters, then numbers can improve credibility. And probably cost fewer characters.

Study cited: Koetsenruijter, A. W. M. (2011). Using numbers in news increases story credibility. Newspaper Research Journal, 32, 74-82.

Casey Anthony -- What (kinda) People Know

2011-07-07T11:19:00.001-04:00

Merely by mentioning Casey Anthony's name will earn me additional hits, but I wanted to briefly discuss not the verdict itself, or even the media saturation coverage of the trial, but rather the remarkable interest the public has shown in this case and its response to the final verdict. Much of that interest was fed by Nancy Grace and Headline News, and with the public response came more and more coverage.

But what's the public response to the verdict? We don't have traditional poll data to rely on (yet), but on Twitter the results seem all one way. Here's an excellent analysis of Twitter traffic that found 64 percent of Twitter users disagreed with the verdict, 35 percent were undecided, and only 1 percent sided with Anthony being found not guilty. Doubt Twitter as a measure of public sentiment? You shouldn't. It's been found in some academic research to be a reasonably good barometer of public opinion. Not as good as a real poll, but good.

While we don't have any real poll data yet, at least that I can find, there is this stupid Huffington Post "informal poll" that found only 50 percent thought Anthony was guilty. I'm rather surprised by such a SLOP (self-selected opinion poll, also known in the survey business as complete bullshit). Usually the angry folks dominate such faux polls, but apparently not in this case. By the way, 28 percent had her guilty of a lesser charge and 17 percent thought she was not guilty. Some might argue hey, that's over 13,000 votes. It's gotta be more accurate than a scientific poll with a carefully drawn sample of 1,000 people. And then you'd be wrong. Size doesn't matter, at least when it comes to surveys. If you doubt this, just look up the infamous Literary Digest poll debacle of 1936. Over a million folks surveyed. Results -- way off. Unless, that is, Alf Landon really was elected president in 1936. And I'm pretty sure he wasn't.

Of course the various networks, including HLN, saw remarkable increases in their TV or online traffic during the trial and with the announcement of the verdict. Much of the response can best be described as anger (Grace, especially, has added fuel to this fire). Negative emotions are more powerful than positive ones. That's why talk radio and the TV talking heads who sell partisan indignation and disgust do so well. Taking a position, it sells.

AEJMC and Political Knowledge

2011-07-07T10:13:00.000-04:00

A few papers in the upcoming AEJMC conference include some aspect of knowledge. Below are some abstracts I've come across that address, in some way, this topic. Unfortunately I won't be attending AEJMC this year.

Social Media Consumption, Interpersonal Relationship and Issue Awareness • Sungsoo Bang, University of Texas, Austin • This study examines the relationship between social media consumption and issue awareness using South Korea’s 2007 national survey dataset. This study finds that there is a significant and positive relationship between consuming social media, such as Internet community sites, and issue awareness. The findings indicate that frequency of using social media significantly and positively increases issue awareness such as public policy. The finding also indicates using social media for socilability is positively related to issue awareness, which is essential for democracy in terms of political knowledge. Furthermore, the finding shows social media uses mediate the relationship between issue awareness and interpersonal relationship such as political discussion, which demonstrates consuming social media decrease the information gap caused by interpersonal relationship.

Exploring News Media Literacy: Developing New Measures of Literacy and Knowledge • Seth Ashley, University of Missouri; Adam Maksl, University of Missouri; Stephanie Craft, University of Missouri • Using a framework previously applied to other areas of media literacy, we developed an attitudinal scale focused specifically on news media literacy and compared that to a knowledge-based index including items about the structure of the U.S. news media system. Among our college student sample, the knowledge-based index was a significant predictor of knowledge about topics in the news, while the attitudinal scale was not. Implications for future work in assessing news literacy are discussed.

Understanding News Preferences in a “Post-Broadcast Democracy”: A Content-by-Style Typology for the Contemporary News Environment • Stephanie Edgerly, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Kjerstin Thorson, University of Southern California; Emily Vraga, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Dhavan Shah • This study develops a 2×2 news typology accounting for an individual’s orientation toward content (news vs. entertainment) and style (factual reports vs. pundit opinions). Findings from cross-sectional and panel data reveal that our typology predicts distinct patterns of news consumption during the 2008 election. Specifically, we predict selection of cable news outlets, soft news programs, and late-night talk shows. Our results also shed light on knowledge change during the 2008 election season.

Knowledge Gaps, Belief Gaps, and Public Opinion about Health Care Reform • Doug Hindman, Washington State University • Partisanship and political polarization has become the norm in national, and increasingly, local politics. The passage of the health care overhaul legislation, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law in March 2010, was no exception to the trend towards greater levels of partisanship; the legislation passed without a single Republican vote. This study raises an additional issue thought to be associated with polarization and partisanship: the distribution among the public of beliefs regarding heavily covered political controversies. Specifically, this study tests hypotheses regarding the distribution of beliefs and knowledge about health care reform. Hypotheses are formulated that seek to extend the knowledge gap to account for the partisan environment. The belief gap hypothesis suggests that in an era of political polarization, self identification along ideological or political party dimensions would be the better predictor of knowledge and beliefs about politically contested issues than would one’s educational level. Findings showed that gaps in beliefs and knowledge regarding health care reform between Republicans and Democrats grew, and traditional knowledge gaps, based on educational level, disappeared. Attention to cable TV news narrowed gaps in knowledge among party identifiers. Findings are discussed in terms of improving news coverage of partisan debates.

The Rise of Specialists, the Fall of Generalists • S. Mo Jang • The present study revisits the question as to whether U.S. citizens are information specialists or information generalists. Although the literature has presented mixed views, the study provides evidence that the changing information environment facilitates the growth of specialists. Using a national survey (n=1208), the study found that individuals seek issue-specific knowledge driven by their perceived issue importance rather than by general education, and that this trend was saliently observed among those who relied on the Internet.

Understanding the Internet’s Impact on International Knowledge and Engagement: News Attention, Social Media Use, and the 2010 Haitian Earthquake • Jason A. Martin, Indiana University School of Journalism • Relatively little is known about how Internet media use and other motivational factors are associated with outcomes such as knowledge of international news and involvement. Recent research suggests that attention and interaction with foreign affairs news is one path to closing the knowledge gap in this context. The acquisition of foreign affairs knowledge also has implications for individuals’ abilities to have a broader worldview, to hold accurate public opinions about foreign nations, to facilitate a greater since of global belonging, and to get involved with international events. This paper examines the relationship of media use, foreign affairs political knowledge, and international involvement. A nationally representative survey conducted shortly after the 2010 Haitian earthquake produced measures of demographics, news media use, social media use, international engagement, general political knowledge, and foreign affairs knowledge. Statistical analysis found that news exposure, news attention and various types of social media use produced significant independent positive associations with international news knowledge and international involvement after demographic controls. Hierarchical regression also found that domestic political knowledge, cable TV exposure, Internet news exposure, and radio exposure were the most important predictors of international knowledge. Another regression found that news attention, e-mail use, social media use, and texting about the Haitian earthquake were the three strongest predictors of international involvement. These findings support related research that has found a positive association among Internet news use, international knowledge, and international engagement while also making new contributions regarding the importance of mediated interpersonal discussion for predicting international involvement.

Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica: A Longitudinal Analysis to Identify the Impact of Social Media on the Standards of Knowledge • Marcus Messner, Virginia Commonwealth University; Marcia DiStaso, Pennsylvania State University • The collaboratively edited online encyclopedia Wikipedia is among the most popular Web sites in the world. Subsequently, it poses a great challenge to traditional encyclopedias, which for centuries have set the standards of society’s knowledge. It is, therefore, important to study the impact of social media on the standards of our knowledge. This longitudinal panel study analyzed the framing of content in entries of Fortune 500 companies in Wikipedia and Encyclopedia Britannica between 2006 and 2010. Content analyses of the length, tonality and topics of 3,985 sentences showed that Wikipedia entries are significantly longer, more positively and negatively framed, and focus more on corporate social responsibilities and legal and ethical issues than in Britannica, which is predominantly neutral. The findings stress that the knowledge-generation processes in society appear to be shifting because of social media. These changes significantly impact which information becomes available to society and how it is framed.

The Influence of Knowledge Gap on Personal and Attributed HIV/AIDS Stigma in Korea • Byoungkwan Lee; Hyun Jung Oh; Seyeon Keum; Younjae Lee, Hanyang University • This study tests a comprehensive model that explicates the influence of AIDS knowledge gap on personal and attributed stigma. Fear of contagion serves as a mediator between AIDS knowledge gap and AIDS stigma. An analysis of the survey data collected to evaluate the impact of 2008 AIDS campaign in Korea reveals that AIDS knowledge was significantly associated with personal stigma both directly and indirectly but only indirectly associated with attributed stigma through fear of contagion.

Perceived Threat, Immigration Policy Support, and Media Coverage: Hostile Media and Presumed Effects in North Carolina • Brendan Watson, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, School of Journalism & Mass Communication; Daniel Riffe, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill • This study, using survey data (N=529), examined perceived “”threat,”" subjective knowledge about immigration, support for punitive and assimilative policies, and opinions about media coverage effects. Perceived threat was related to support for punitive policies, and “”hostile media perception”" was confirmed. However, perceived threat was not related to presumed influence of coverage. Internet use, age, race, and education predicted threat perception; perceived threat, perceived favorableness of coverage, and daily newspaper reading predicted presumed influence of coverage.

Evolutionary Psychology, Social Emotions and Social Networking Sites — An Integrative Model • Sandra Suran; Gary Pettey; Cheryl Bracken; Robert Whitbred • This exploratory research employed an Evolutionary Psychology (EP) perspective whereby the human mind is viewed through the lens of the physiological and psychological mechanisms that created the developmental programs we use today (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). This theoretical framework was used to study the relationship between human behavior, the state of alienation, and Social Networking Sites (SNS). Based on survey data from college students, there seemed to be a relationship between alienation and SNS. Alienation dimensions were highest among those who had the lowest amount of contacts on SNS. The findings from this study will add to the body of knowledge on Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) as well as afford an opportunity for further research in understanding human behavior engaged in SNS through the viewpoint of Evolutionary Psychology.

Social Networking Sites and Likeminded Others

2011-07-01T13:39:00.001-04:00

Selective exposure, the idea we seek out information that agrees with our point or view or avoid sources that disagree with our point of view, is an appealing notion. Unfortunately, it's one that has mixed findings.

One aspect of selective exposure is the idea that social networking sites like Facebook will make it worse. We'll hang out, digitally that is, with folks a lot like ourselves. There are ways Facebook organizes our news feed ("top news" versus "most recent") that should make this even worse. That's a topic for another time, but look at both and you'll see. Based on this and what we know about source preference, social networking sites might be expected to decrease our exposure to opinions unlike our own.

But this study finds just the opposite, that social networking sites may increase our exposure to dissimilar views. Using Pew data, the authors found use of SNS predicted exposure to cross-cutting political viewpoints even after statistically controlling for a number of socio-demographic factors (age, education, etc.). This holds across partisan predispositions.

Oddly, traditional news was unrelated in the model to exposure to cross-cutting views (see Table 2). This is where the study, for me, starts to raise serious questions. No where else except a mainstream, traditional approach to news will you find all sides presented more or less fairly, or at least given roughly equal time/space. This excludes, of course, certain talking head shows on Fox News, MSNBC, etc. So either social networking sites like Facebook are the salvation when it comes to exposing people to dissimilar views, or there's something wrong methodologically in the study. Let's break it down.

SNS Use: this is a 5-question index devoted specifically to using Facebook, etc., for news and political information. This makes for a very different measure than mere use of SNS, so already the results apply only for those who make use of FB and other SNS to find out news and political info. I'm an avid FB user, but I never think to use it for that, so we're talking about a variable constrained by the particular use of the medium.

Cross-Cutting Exposure: The dependent variable here is a single item described as "respondents were asked to indicate whether most of the sites they visit to get political or campaign information online challenge their own point of view, share their point of view, or do not have a particular point of view." This dependent variable is loaded with social desirability. I don't know how I'd do it differently, given the reliance on the Pew data, but this question only measures people's perception of their news choices, not their actual news choices. A Fox News viewer who is politically conservative may answer this question in such a way that yes, I seek out views that challenge my own -- but we all know that in this case, it just ain't so.

Yes, you can quibble with any methodology. That does not take away the study's main finding, that social networking sites lead to greater exposure to opinions you disagree with. It's rather surprising, theoretically. Indeed, the study hypothesizes such a result but I'd argue the original hypothesis, based on all we know, should have been the other way around. It should have hypothesized that FB use would lead to less, not greater, exposure to dissimilar others.

Knowledge and Support for Civil Liberties

2011-06-30T13:29:00.000-04:00

It's an assumption that the more educated and knowledgeable a person is, the greater the support for civil liberties. We see the same kinds of relationships between education/knowledge and tolerance. The knowledge-civil liberties assumption is rarely tested because, well, it's an assumption.

A study in a recent Journal of Politics (volume 73, April 2011, pp 463-476) actually tests this assumption. And finds it wanting.

Written by five folks from Yale and one (sympathy?) author from Michigan State, the study uses a field experiment at 59 high school classrooms to find that enhanced civics classes lead to greater constitutional knowledge as compared to students in conventional civics classes. No surprise there. But unlike previous assumptions and correlational studies, it also found no increased support for civil liberties. As the authors write:

The findings imply that students can become more knowledgeable about the Constitution and workings of government without experiencing a concomitant shift in their support for free speech, dissent, or due process. This pattern of results is striking both because this experiment has ample power to detect even small effects and because, as noted above, the statistical test is biased in favor of finding a mediating relationship. The theoretical implications of this finding are profound. Evidently, it is possible to increase awareness and understanding of civil liberties without producing an increase in support for those civil liberties. This finding therefore calls into question the longstanding argument that beliefs and attitudes are causally linked in this domain.

To put this in somewhat less theoretical words -- oh crap.

The question of whether knowledge is associated with, or independent of, attitudes has been of some interest lately. Approaches such as motivated reasoning point to this separation, finding that basically people believe what they want to believe, regardless of the factual nature of, um, the facts.

The results above are more complicated than that, but they do suggest very different avenues of cognition and belief. Or, as the authors suggest, it may be that knowledge and attitudes are "casually disconnected." As they say:

One cannot increase support for civil liberties simply by teaching students about the provisions of law that are designed to protect these liberties.

Twitter May Not Make Us Stupid, But ...

2011-06-29T11:30:00.000-04:00

There is of course a silly argument semi-raging online about whether Twitter makes us stupid. Of course it doesn't. Making us dumber is the job of reality television, especially Jersey Shore.

But this does raise the question of whether exposure to Twitter is associated with greater political knowledge.

The answer? No one knows.

Few if any studies directly examine the micro-blogging site Twitter and any potential political learning. A number of studies have examined the motivations for reading blogs or Internet use among the young and participation or even the troubling consequeces of online rumors, which leads to misperceptions rather than knowledge. So far I haven't seen any solid, systematic attempts to explore whether Twitter leads to greater knowledge. They may be out there, but I haven't found them.

And so, like any good blogging academic, I'm gonna make stuff up.

Or rather, I'll extrapolate what we know about media consumption and political knowledge to answer the question of whether Twitter makes us politically smarter, politically dumber, or (to not bury the lede) probably makes no difference at all.

The Dumber Argument

Twitter as social media automatically gets frowned on, just as television news did as it emerged to overtake print news consumption, and not without good reason. TV news does suffer from delusions of adequacy, but we know now that watching news on TV actually leads to greater knowledge -- for those who have little prior knowledge, or who are less educated, or who are less interested in public affairs.

In other words, TV news works best for those who don't know all that much in the first place. But what about Twitter? The argument for dumber is based on a large part to the billions of stupid posts that litter the Twittersphere. Never mind the good posts, the 140 characters-or-less comments and pointers to good journalism. There is a time-wasting aspect to Twitter, certainly, and the dumber argument rests largely on the combination of stupid posts and time spent on a medium that presents itself in fragmented, oddly phrased posts. It's not a bad argument, but it's wrong. There is no data that suggests reading tweets makes you dumber or even shortens your attention span. It does steal time from more meaningful content, but a counter to that is that many tweets actually point toward compelling content a reader may have missed otherwise.

The Smarter Argument

There is little data to support this argument either. Some correlational data may suggest greater political knowledge is associated with using Twitter, but that's a function of the kind of people who choose to tweet or read tweets -- people who happen to already be news junkies. Even statistical controls for various demographics may not capture all the factors that better explain what people know than would using Twitter.

For the chattering class and those who follow the chattering class, no doubt Twitter is a boon. But does it lead to greater knowledge? No. For those folks, they're probably learning no more than they already know, which is probably a lot based on traditional tests of political knowledge. Twitter is another tool, but it's not making anyone like to use it any smarter. There's a ceiling effect here. But what about Twitter users who are not news junkies? Odds are they're not any smarter, politically, from the medium and indeed their social use of tweets would probably drive down the political knowledge scores of overall Twitter users. Which leads us to the next category ...

Twitter Makes No Difference

This argument rests largely on the lack of data, the discussion above of how the news junkies have a ceiling effect on knowledge and social users might offset any high scores Twitter users get on tests of political knowledge, and an appreciation for a finely crafted null hypothesis.

There are strong methodological reasons why exposure to mainstream news sources may actually be unrelated to political knowledge, in part due to measurement error associated with the kinds of exposure questions we ask in surveys. I don't buy that particular argument, though it's loved by political scientists who tend to shy away from, or explain away, media factors in understanding politics. The media have a modest but significant relationship with knowledge, but Twitter -- once you control for other factors and due to its unique audience -- will not have enough variance left to explain.

In other words, Twitter will be found to be unrelated to political knowledge. It doesn't make you smarter, it doesn't make you dumber. At least not politically. People who are drawn to Twitter to escape the news, those folks fled the news long ago.

We're All Brands Now?

2011-06-28T13:15:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure I want to be a brand. But I doubt that matters.

There's debate mini-raging based on Gene Weingarten's original Washington Post column in which he complains that "branding" is destroying journalism and that j-schools are "urging their students to market themselves like Cheez Doodles." Or, as he says:

We are slowly redefining our craft so it is no longer a calling but a commodity. From this execrable marketing trend arises the term you ask me about: “branding.”

It's this response by Mathew Ingram that nicely sums up the counter argument. "We are all brands now," he says. "So get used to it." As Ingram says:

I hate to be the one to break it to Weingarten, but the journalism business as a whole is becoming a commodity in many ways. But it’s not journalists and media organizations that are redefining it as such, it is the market itself — and the fact that media is becoming something that anyone can do. The tools for publishing and becoming a “media brand” are available to anyone now thanks to blogs and Twitter and Facebook, and that has made the world of media and journalism a lot flatter, as NBC White House correspondent Chuck Todd noted in a recent interview with the Poynter Institute.

So we're all brands now. Hell, this blog along suggests I am a brand, or at least I try to be a brand, though clearly not much of one. Just look at my PeerIndex number and you'll see. No one's buying.

But we've always been brands, if you take a broad definition of "brand" and think of impression formation and maintenance. Yes, being a "brand" strikes many as unseemly and unsavory. It suggests shameless self-promotion. Bob Woodward is a brand. So, sadly, is Perez Hilton. Are you a brand even if you refuse to think of yourself as a brand? I'm not sure. The argument here is muddled by a lack of precision in what we mean by "brand" and whether brand is in the eyes of the beholder, or holder, of that brand name.

And what's this got to do with what people know? Hold on, I'm trying to get there.

Given the nature of this blog, I'm not going to dive into the "brand is bad for journalism" argument other than to say that if you spend time building your brand, that's time you've not spent doing good journalism. There are only so many hours in a day. I also suspect, but can't prove, there is a negative correlation among academics who attempt to brand themselves via social media (er, kinda like me) and the scholarship they actually produce. If I had time, I'd test this hypothesis by looking at tweets versus peer-reviewed publications. I think I'm right.

So does the hypothesis above also apply to doing journalism? Probably, to some degree. Again, only 24 hours in a day. But by building your "brand" as a journalist, you also open more doors, you gain more leverage, you gather about you the trust and followers among those who not only want to hear or read the stories you have to tell, but also want to share those with their friends. Remember, recommendations by "friends" do matter to people, as new research shows, even more so than that person's feelings toward a specific news organization. In other words, if I'm a conservative I generally ignore MSNBC, except friend recommendations, as one experiment shows, can trump this partisan preference.

Okay, I'm off track a bit. Does it matter, all this branding stuff, to what people learn from the media? Absolutely, though I don't know of any research that directly backs up this assertion. My gut feeling, based on nearly 25 years of being immersed in social science research and more years than that as a journalist or journalism professor, is that trust matters in how people expose themselves to a news source and what they get out of that source. Never mind the sharing part, which will also matter. Let's look only at source->receiver relationships. With more trust comes more careful reading/listening to stories, and with that should come greater knowledge about public affairs.

In an indirect way, then, branding helps us the consumer of news find news we can trust, just like the New York Times is a brand, just like Fox News is a brand. Individual journalists, especially columnists, have long been "brands" in every sense of the word. Beat reporters are also a brand, though very localized. Although I'm an old print newspaper guy (who uses the hell out of his iPad), I think we (the royal journalistic we) can balance our branding and our newsgathering and storytelling. But -- branding alone, hollow shameless self-plugging -- will never replace good reporting and good writing.

I hope people will see through that, and respond appropriately.

News with a Partisan Slant?

2011-06-27T10:56:00.001-04:00

I wrote a couple of days ago about a new Public Opinion Quarterly study that finds people who consume "likeminded news" (news that agrees with their partisan point of view) actually increases certain aspects of political participation. In that piece I promised to review the study author's categorization scheme for which television news programs qualified as being slanted toward Republicans, Democrats, or neutral. Here's my take.

First, let's recreate the list from the study's appendix (Table A1, p. 312, if you have access to POQ). Remember these are 2008 programs, so some have disappeared. I comment after each category, only briefly, then I'll get into details after the list on how the author assigned programs or networks to the categories.

Programs with a Republican Slant

The Beltway Boys
Fox & Friends
Fox News
The Fox Report with Shepard Smith
Geraldo at Large
etc etc., all of them Fox News programs...

Okay, I stopped here listing them because they're all Fox News shows, and I think most of us might agree with the slant (except Studio B with Shepard Smith, which to me is one of the more "straight" presentations on Fox. So I quibble with that one).

Programs with a Democratic Slant

ABC Nightline
Anderson Cooper 360
BET News
CNN Headline News
The Colbert Report (really, it's in there)
Countdown with Keith Olbermann
The Daily Show (really)
Good Morning America
Hardball with Chris Matthews
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
MSNBC Live
Out in the Open
Situation Room
The View
This Week with George Stephanopoulous

As you can tell, a bunch of major networks and their shows. Again I have quibbles, especially with Situation Room, which strikes me as a journalism guy with some small experience as fairly straightforward in its presentation. And it's amusing to see Steward and Colbert in there as news programs, but I think we can all buy into that as well.

And finally, Neutral Programs

ABC World News
CBS Evening News
America This Morning
CBS Morning News
etc etc. all three major networks and morning shows
Frontline
Larry King Live
Lou Dobbs
60 Minutes
McLaughlin Group
20/20
NewsHour
Reliable Sources
Meet the Press

Okay, we can quibble with the list above too. Lou Dobbs? Neutral? McLaughlin Group? All in all, the list above seems mostly right to me, but of course your first methodological question should be -- how the heck do you systematically decide what program or network goes in which category? Good question. The explanation, also found in the article's appendix, is complicated. Let's walk through it.

What candidate does a program favor? This was a follow-up question to respondents who reported certain media exposure.
Mix and Match. "I took into account respondents' perceptions of partisan slant for both the program and its parent network," says the author, trying to assign a category to unmentioned programs or to further justify the categorization.
A statistical threshold of 25 percent was used to make sure the categories were firm. More on this in the appendix.
A Lexis-Nexis search was used for rarely mentioned programs, using various terms like liberal or Republican to assign a slant to a program or its host.

This is some creative work, and I've only skimmed above the detailed effort to assign programs to what any reasonable, informed person might (or might not) agree with. But it's important some systematic approach be used, not just gut feeling, when doing this kind of work. So I applaud the effort while quibbling with a few of the assignments. After all, in large part we're talking above about general respondent impressions of a news organization or program and their slant, not the reality of its journalistic approach. Given the constraints, this is an excellent stab at categorizing programs and networks.

The Power of Social Influence

2011-06-27T08:25:00.000-04:00

As I teach a graduate class on social media this summer, I've skimmed or read deeply a large body of work on the effects of Twitter, Facebook, etc., on our social and political perceptions -- deciding whether to include them or not in class. Today we're discussing a couple of studies that suggest a dramatic shift is taking place in how people organize their news consumption habits and the consequences on what stories they consume.

One interesting point is this -- that picking your news by partisan predispositions (conservatives to Fox, liberals to MSNBC, and so on) is being shattered by social media. A set of experiments shows that, instead, individual recommendations outweigh source preference. In other words, if I'm conservative and I love Fox News, that's all well and good, but a recommendation from a "friend" via social media will trump that preference.

Given we tend to selectively expose ourselves to likeminded others -- people hang out with people like themselves -- this trumping of news source by friend recommendation may not mean so very much. Or it may mean everything. It's too early to tell, but it raises some interesting questions as we watch the media audience fragment along partisan lines. Perhaps personal recommendations is a way to bring the news consumption universe back into order. Or perhaps it'll make things worse. Again, it's too early to tell, but my gut says a growing reliance on friend recommendations will only increase the likelihood we consume news that tells us what we want to hear. And that's the bad news of the day.