Natural experiments are terrific -- if you can plan ahead or have the resources to quickly take advantage of one as it occurs. This study does just that, finding that people who received information from the Social Security Administration gained more knowledge and had more confidence in Social Security than people who did not receive the information. And this includes statistical controls for such predictors as age, education, race, and gender.
The study, published in a recent The Journal of Politics, includes a neat structural equation model for those who like pretty pictures and smoke-and-mirrors statistical analyses to arrive at an interesting conclusion, that knowledge leads to confidence. And not the other way around.
Oh, and Happy New Year.
Showing posts with label confidence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label confidence. Show all posts
Monday, January 3, 2011
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Efficacy and Voting
I blogged yesterday (or see below) about a study from American Behavioral Scientist that examines the role of efficacy and confidence of one's knowledge -- especially among young voters -- and voting. In that post I broke down the methodology and touched on key concepts. Today I sum up the results and ask about their meaningfulness in real-world politics.
Basically it goes like this: younger voters are less confident of their political knowledge, of their competence to vote. This affects their likelihood to vote. The results in this study are a bit slim, more tantalizing than conclusive. And the role of media is unclear in this study.
But it makes sense that younger voters might be less confidence in their electoral competence. They tend to consume less news and to not have built up a foundation of political knowledge from previous elections and campaigns. That, along with other factors, suggests lower voting.
So what do we do? Build up their confidence?
No.
We have enough of this self-esteem crap in schools, especially among kids who don't have all that much to be "esteemed" about. If young people fill up on empty-calorie content such as The Daily Show without also consuming serious news, then they're likely to feel like they have a base of knowledge from which to vote but instead have little actual knowledge. You might increase voting, but you might also increase "bad" voting. I'm not sure how much a democracy gains, though I suppose indifferent or inconsistent voting beats no voting at all.
Basically it goes like this: younger voters are less confident of their political knowledge, of their competence to vote. This affects their likelihood to vote. The results in this study are a bit slim, more tantalizing than conclusive. And the role of media is unclear in this study.
But it makes sense that younger voters might be less confidence in their electoral competence. They tend to consume less news and to not have built up a foundation of political knowledge from previous elections and campaigns. That, along with other factors, suggests lower voting.
So what do we do? Build up their confidence?
No.
We have enough of this self-esteem crap in schools, especially among kids who don't have all that much to be "esteemed" about. If young people fill up on empty-calorie content such as The Daily Show without also consuming serious news, then they're likely to feel like they have a base of knowledge from which to vote but instead have little actual knowledge. You might increase voting, but you might also increase "bad" voting. I'm not sure how much a democracy gains, though I suppose indifferent or inconsistent voting beats no voting at all.
Friday, May 8, 2009
Confidence in Major institutions
I'm always a sucker for surveys and one of my favorites is tracking people's confidence or trust in major institutions such as Congress, the military, the press, and all the rest. You can tell a lot about the whims of public opinion by examining them over time.
Using Harris poll data drawn from here, let's look at a few.
The Press. Of course I start here, being a journalism guy. Since 2002 the press has seen a high of 16 percent saying they have "a great deal of confidence" to a low of 2009, where it sits at 12 percent. Still, that's probably within the margin of error. There's also a category for Television News and the latest number was 22 percent. It's bounced around the 20 mark for several years.
Colleges and Universities. Gotta go here too given that a major university pays my salary. This has actually gone up from a low of 33 percent with "great confidence" to 40 percent this year. Woo woo! We rock.
Wall Street. Oh what a beating Wall Street has taken, so it's no surprise that the richies have dropped from 19 to 4 percent of people having great confidence. Four percent? That's the lowest of any of the 16 institutions examined. Even Congress, which has slipped to 9 percent from a high of 22 percent.
Organized Religion was at its lowest in 2002 but now is at 28 percent. Not bad.
Overall, most major institutions have seen a drop in confidence over time. This is nothing new. I remember in graduate school reading a textbook, The Confidence Gap, that discussed the trend from the 1970s as trust in major institutions slowly eroded (in part a Watergate effect, in part Vietnam, in part everything else).
Coincidentally (not really) I am working on a research paper that examines trust in government and how being a winner or loser in an election affects your trust. Lots of people have mined this territory, including a couple of professors of mine in grad school, but I'm taking a different twist that, as far as I can tell, no one has explored yet. More when I get the blasted thing actually finished, but basically I'm looking at winners and losers and whether or not you expected to win (but lost) and how that may lead to even less trust. And there's media stuff there too. Sigh ... if I finish grading, maybe I can get back to it.
Using Harris poll data drawn from here, let's look at a few.
The Press. Of course I start here, being a journalism guy. Since 2002 the press has seen a high of 16 percent saying they have "a great deal of confidence" to a low of 2009, where it sits at 12 percent. Still, that's probably within the margin of error. There's also a category for Television News and the latest number was 22 percent. It's bounced around the 20 mark for several years.
Colleges and Universities. Gotta go here too given that a major university pays my salary. This has actually gone up from a low of 33 percent with "great confidence" to 40 percent this year. Woo woo! We rock.
Wall Street. Oh what a beating Wall Street has taken, so it's no surprise that the richies have dropped from 19 to 4 percent of people having great confidence. Four percent? That's the lowest of any of the 16 institutions examined. Even Congress, which has slipped to 9 percent from a high of 22 percent.
Organized Religion was at its lowest in 2002 but now is at 28 percent. Not bad.
Overall, most major institutions have seen a drop in confidence over time. This is nothing new. I remember in graduate school reading a textbook, The Confidence Gap, that discussed the trend from the 1970s as trust in major institutions slowly eroded (in part a Watergate effect, in part Vietnam, in part everything else).
Coincidentally (not really) I am working on a research paper that examines trust in government and how being a winner or loser in an election affects your trust. Lots of people have mined this territory, including a couple of professors of mine in grad school, but I'm taking a different twist that, as far as I can tell, no one has explored yet. More when I get the blasted thing actually finished, but basically I'm looking at winners and losers and whether or not you expected to win (but lost) and how that may lead to even less trust. And there's media stuff there too. Sigh ... if I finish grading, maybe I can get back to it.
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