It's Not Just Colons?

I've blogged at length about titular colonicity, most recently here.  The idea is simple: as an academic discipline "matures" you find more and more journal article titles with a colon.  Yeah, people study this stuff.  And now I've stumbled across a similar study, this one about question marks.  The article title? 

Scholarly communication in transition: The use of question marks in the titles of scientific articles in medicine, life sciences and physics 1966–2005

Which is odd, because the title has a colon, not a question mark.  I'm very confused.  As the abstract explains:

We examined nearly 20 million scientific articles and recorded the development of articles with a question mark at the end of their titles over the last 40 years. Our study was confined to the disciplines of physics, life sciences and medicine, where we found a significant increase from 50% to more than 200% in the number of articles with question-mark titles.

A couple of points.  First, I'd kill myself before I every conducted a content analysis of a bejillion articles in a search for question marks.  Second, I'd kill myself again, just to be sure I did it right.  And third -- this kinda matters.  Not me killing myself, though some might cheer the notion, but rather it's interesting how academic fields ripen and mature and seek out ways to make themselves seem more -- er -- academic. 
 
I should point out that one of the most popular terms people search for, and end up here, is titular colonicity.  The other popular one is cognitive mobilization. 

Studying Tea Baggers II

I blogged previously about how scholars might go about studying the tea bag movement, at least with a survey approach, and along the way I rattled off some possible ways we might measure self-identification as a tea bagger, or at least as a sympathizer with the movement.

We could ask folks if they consider themselves part of the movement in a yes-no format, but that's unsatisfying.  We could ask them how closely they identify with the movement and get some 1-to-7 scale to provide more statistical power.   We could ask about some tea bag movement favorite topics (big government, socialism, birther issues about Obama, etc.), but I'm not sure we could capture, or afford to capture, all the issues both serious and wacky that causes individuals to identify with the movement or attend rallies.

What I failed to get into earlier was the media angle to such research.

The obvious one is where people get their news.  We'd offer all the favorites, from Fox to CNN to Limbaugh to Letterman, your basic measures of media exposure.  But I'd also want measures of attitudes toward the news media because I suspect we'd find a lot of interesting explanatory power in those "trust" items.

I'd want to go deeper.

I'd create a matrix in which respondents compared major news sources against one another.  How much is CNN like Fox?  CNN like MSNBC?  CNN like the major broadcast networks?  Etc. etc.  In other words, pick a good dozen likely news sources and -- I admit this would take forever in a phone survey -- compare each item against all the others.  The end result?  Multidimentional scaling would take the data and paint us a pretty picture of how tea baggers versus, I suppose, non-baggers, view the mediaverse.  You could do this in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space.  This is kinda cool stuff -- which proves my inner-geek, but also informative at how folks organize the media world in their heads.

Of course that's too many questions for an ANES survey, which honestly would struggle in a pool of a couple of thousand randomly selected folks to get more than a coupla hundred tea baggers.  So that's out.  This calls for going into the field, to those wacky rallies, and wrestling down some respondents.

The results would be fascinating.

Studying Tea-Baggers

The tea bag movement is big, broad, loud, a bit kooky, damned angry, and manages to combine brutal honesty with absolute dishonesty under one big fat crazy tent.  It's a helluva story from a journalist's point of view, a helluva opportunity from a political operative's point of view, and a helluva topic for research from a scholar's point of view.

Let's focus on the latter.

If you were prepping a study on the movement, let's say a survey, how would you identify someone as a tea-bagger?  By a preference for Earl Grey?  No, that won't work.  Can we simply ask respondents how much they identify with the movement?  Yeah, maybe, and that's a start, but I think you'd be tempted to also list off a bunch of "tea bag" concerns to see what people think about them.  The problem is the movement itself seems more a confederation of frustrated folks who don't all agree on what it is they're frustrated about -- though fears of "big government" may be the single overriding factor.

I think you'd want two or three "identification" items designed to find out how close or attached people feel toward the movement, not unlike how we measure attitudinal proximity or membership to the traditional political parties.  You might also want to tap into the four or five (at least) major themes that tend to bubble up at tea party gatherings, such as big government, but that gets tricky too.  Some are the "Obama is not American" kooks.  While it's fun to ask those kinds of questions, do they tell us much theoretically about the movement itself?  No, from an academic standpoint -- which is different than a journalistic or political approach, we'd want to know what underlying characteristics, even personality constructs, drive someone to become a tea bagger.  I suspect we might see some of the Gamson hypothesis (but also see this brilliant piece of research) stuff going on here, a combination of frustration and anger with high self efficacy, and the roots of that frustration is what academics should be studying in more detail because I think it goes deeper than mere fear of Obama.

But fear is a good place to start.

There are of course lots of scales out there that tap into some of the root issues, from efficacy to trust to -- yup -- fear.  I'm afraid we're missing a lot of this, in part because the major data collection moments have passed.  ANES did its pre- and post-election stuff, but rarely do you find systematic data collection a year or so after an election, so we may find ourselves studying the tea bag movement a year or two after its big moment, relying on memories rather than "in the moment" data collection. And that's too bad.

Owning a TV Station

It's kinda cool, and a bit retro, that my college bought a TV station.  Given our Internet age, it's as if we're living That 70's Show. 

But there are some interesting research possibilities in having your own station, concepts you can study by having control over content and programming.  A lot of these possibilities are beyond the scope of what people know and get into other research areas, such as management and audience studies, but I think if the folks who work with the station and video can figure out ways to manipulate programming we can better understand how people learn about certain issues -- our main topics usually being poverty and health.

How do you do that?

Not the old fashioned way, like in print, where you might randomly assign readers to different versions of stories or even editions of the newspaper.  That's hard to do with a television signal.  But the folks who do this stuff can devise a series of programs on an issue and explore how much this raises audience awareness or likelihood to seek out some health care.  Even better, from a research standpoint, they could craft webcasts where you do get real manipulation of content to explore what works and what doesn't work, hopefully something beyond the tired old studies of college sophomores sitting in a laboratory, watching TV and filling out a questionnaire.

Political learning is a bit more difficult, but I think it might be interesting to do one week of newscasts in one style, measure responses, and then do the next week in a somewhat different style, and measure responses (learning, interest, etc.).  Maybe one week could focus more on straight news, the next week on more narrative styles of storytelling, and see then which seems to work.  The stories themselves would not be equivalent -- so it's hardly a perfect experiment -- but you gain a lot in generalizability.

But the area most ripe for this kind of research is priming.  TV news, in particular, has a powerful priming effect, as was detailed at length in the excellent book, News That Matters.  I'd love to see a research program using WNEG that attacks some area -- health or public affairs or whatever -- along these conceptual lines, given the access and control one can have over content in a station owned by a mass comm program like Grady.

Women Cheat More, Better Liars About It

Offered with little comment, a story about research that finds women not only have more affairs than men, but they're better at lying about it.  I suppose what you know, guys, isn't what's really happening.  Kinda what people know, at least on a Friday when my standards are low.

Multi-Taskers are Mediocre

Interesting research on multi-tasking that came out last week. There's a NYTimes version and a slightly better by Wired that includes info on how the study was conducted. Basically, multi-taskers may do a lot of stuff at the same time, but they do none of it particularly well.

From one of the authors:

"Multitaskers were just lousy at everything,” said Clifford I. Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford and one of the study’s investigators. “It was a complete and total shock to me.”

You can read the abstract here. It reports multitaskers were "more susceptible to interference" and they performed less well on memory tasks (this last part not from the abstract but rather the Wired version of the story).

So what?

We all multi-task. Especially when we're consuming the news.

So I'm thinking, if we multitask, do we remember less of the news? Seems an obvious yeah, but how do we test this? Controlled experiment is the easy answer. But what about a survey? We could ask people how often they watch or read the news while doing something else, and what that "something else" might be. Assuming they're honest, we'd find some interesting results in political knowledge.

Okay, what about people who multitask the news. That is, people who say they use lots of difference sources, like TV and newspapers and online and magazines. This is not traditional multitasking (doing many things at once), but kinda interesting nonetheless. We want people to rely on multiple news sources, but is that also a bad thing? This is easily tested in a survey scenario: just ask them about all the different ways they get news and then create an index that measures the variety of sources. Will more variety be associated with more, or less, political knowledge?

Dunno. If time allows, I'll do a quick-and-dirty analysis this week and report back.

Post-Election Knowledge Blues

If you spend time analyzing data, especially survey data collected over time, you'll notice a funny thing -- in presidential years, many variables are higher (participation, interest, and yes ... political knowledge). Mess around with the American National Election Studies cumulative data set, yeah that's a mouthful, and you'll see a herky-jerky up-and-down trend line in data that has been collected every two years since 1948.

Yeah, I'm geeky when it comes to playing with data, and it's pretty damn PhDweebish to get a kick out of analyzing data collected across fifty years. I need another hobby besides Scotch.

But now we have the post-election blues. Interest for this election was high, turnout turned out okay, and I'm guessing political knowledge at least about the campaign's chief actors and issues were higher than a couple of years ago. So now, as the blues set in, issue knowledge will probably decrease. Won't it?

We'll have to see, but my guess is yeah, the news media will see dwindling advertising dollars, especially those local TV boob tube stations, and we'll see a smaller audience, and fewer advertisements, and subsequently less political knowledge. And so it goes.

Soon PhDweebs like me will be craftily analyzing the election data to find out if debates mattered, if advertisements mattered, if parodies like The Daily Show or The Colbert Report mattered, if the news mattered. Oh, and if SNL's Tina Fey mattered.

Pick your Dependent Variable, let a thousand studies bloom, many of which will barely deserve publication but a host of which will find their way to an academic conference near you. Looking specifically at political learning, I'm guessing advertisements will continue their growing role in what people know about the campaign, and debates will also predict political knowledge. I strongly suspect traditional news media exposure will continue to be a predictor, if only because the smaller number of people who rely on those sources tend to score the highest on such tests.

The Internet? When you control for other factors, reading blogs and the like tend to not predict all that much when it comes to knowledge, but that'll be fun to explore as well.

When you move beyond knowledge and look at attitudes and perceptions of the candidates and all that stuff, then it gets even more interesting. As studies roll out, I'll try to keep up here and let people know what's being found. Unfortunately it often takes a year or two before academic studies find their way to publication. The first conferences (ICA, AEJMC, etc.) will be a better source of early results. I'll keep my eye on 'em and let my tens of readers worldwide know what's up.

Titular Colonicity

Titular colonicity is not a medical test that involves bending over for a doctor wearing rubber gloves. No, this has to do with our tendency to put colons in titles, especially academic work. A study from a while back examined this from 1880 to 1980. Brilliant! And heck, who knew it had a name?

I've always wanted to do a study of colons in our academic journal article titles, and now I have a keyword and some theoretical background. The use of the colon is considered the mark of scholarly quality. Who needs good research as long as you have the following:

Clever Phrase (colon) Description of the Research

The authors found that 72 percent of articles in 30 journals included a colon. And it's historical. They have a neat graphic that shows how around 1950 or so there is a leap in use of the colon. Cool!

I'd love to look at the mass comm literature over time and compare it to a similar field, like political science or speech comm or sociology. And are there kinds of research in mass comm that are more likely to use colons versus others? The only way to find out is to do it. Of course then I'd have to figure out where to send such research.

And I'd also need a title. With a colon.