What People Know ... in Japan

Political knowledge is apparently rarely studied in Japan, or so says this abstract of a new paper you may or may not be able to access depending on whether you're on a college campus or not. That's okay. I'm here for you.

The authors find that "in line with previous studies in the US context, that knowledge is explained by education, gender, and politically impinged employment as base factors, with interest, efficacy, and civic duty playing a role as second-stage behavioral factors." It's good to see basic results confirmed cross nations and cultures. The media stuff, though, is interesting. Soft news depresses knowledge, in this analysis, while print and even television traditional news improve political knowledge.  As the authors note:

At the same time, our findings lend credence to previous work that raises concerns about the ‘infotainization’ of Japanese (and US) news programming (e.g., Taniguchi, 2007; Prior, 2005). Rather than demystifying or democratizing Japanese politics, softer programs may simply be perpetuating extant gaps between elites and the public.

In other words, soft news may maintain or even increase the knowledge gap seen in the public -- even in Japan.

A Growing Knowledge Gap?

I was listening to a talk -- via the magic of iTunes -- by John Lloyd of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and he said one thing that caught my ear.  I'm working from memory, but he discussed focus group research that found a growing gap between those who follow public affairs and those who do not.  He didn't use the academic term knowledge gap, but his point was a good one and deserves discussion. 

It's a bit convoluted, but bear with me. 

With so many choices now available (cable TV, satellite, the Net, etc.), it's clearly easier now than ever before for those with little or no interest in the news to avoid the news.  Without such haphazard exposure to news, especially from TV, the least informed among us are even less informed -- or so goes the theory.  Those who want to keep up, those motivated to do so, or with the ability to do so, have never had it better.  So many ways, so many channels, so many choices. 

Hence, the gap.  Or the perceived gap, because as far as I  know no one has systematically tested this idea of late.  It makes sense, but it's damn hard to demonstrate a growing gap over time, especially as the kinds of questions we ask in surveys tend to differ just enough to make you wonder whether differences over time are real or merely an artifact of the kinds of survey questions offered in a given year.

My gut feeling?  The gap has widened, that Lloyd is right (as is Marcus Prior and a host of others, including myself, who work in this area).  But I'm not exactly sure how to demonstrate this with longitudinal data, at least not convincingly, though there are a few classic books from many years ago that did this (Paradox of Mass Politics being one).  I'm going to give it more thought because if I do find a way, it's an  interesting research question to tackle.  And maybe they'd invite me to Oxford to give a talk (I taught there for six weeks as part of the UGA@Oxford program, so I'm read to go back ... hint hint).

Move Over TV News

A new Pew study shows that, among college grads, the Internet has begun to rival television news as a source of information.

First off, let's establish that a historical point -- the greater the education, the less the reliance on TV for news and information.  It's that whole delusions of adequacy thing.  The audience for TV news, local especially, tends to skew to the less educated.  So the Pew report is not all that surprising, but it does document quite nicely the growing power of the Net when it comes to how the educated keep informed.

Blogger is in one of its moods, so I'm having trouble dropping in a key graphic from the report.  Here's a few key numbers.  For those with a high school education or less, 75 percent said they rely on TV news and 29 percent said they rely on the Internet.  For those with a college degree, the same numbers are 54 and 51 percent.  That's huge, and telling.  And problematic for the TV folks. 

What I find interesting is the lack of a partisan effect.  Dems, GOPers, Independents, they all break down more or less the same in the aggregate media use columns.  Now if we get into the nitty gritty, not provided here, we'd find the usual partisan migration to Fox or MSNBC, but it's interesting as hell to see that at the aggregate media use level, your partisan leanings don't seem to correlate with a general preference for TV news versus that of the Net or other sources.

In terms of what people know, we can make a few assumptions based on these results.  First, TV news appeals to the less educated not because TV news is dumb, but because it's more easily consumed, provides less detail, but makes the world's events more understandable given the way TV tells a story.  We know from other studies that TV news seems to inform only those with little or no information in the first place -- which is a fine and useful mission, though it might raise certain issues when it comes to selling advertising that appeals to a prime audience.  Print, especially, seems to require a lot more background knowledge and certainly motivation in order to grasp the content. 

What we may see, as this migration among media continues, is a growing knowledge gap between those of less and more education. 

Knowledge Gap Research

The knowledge gap has been one of those long-standing mass comm research areas, not unlike agenda-setting, that refuses to die (and I wish agenda-setting would, but that's a different issue).

The knowledge gap hypothesis "proposes that the media can increase gaps in knowledge" and as information increases, those of higher SES tend to acquire information more than those lower in SES.  A meta-analysis published in the latest issue of Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly (volume 66, #3, Autumn, 2009, 515-532, for the citationally inclined) confirms the existence of a knowledge gap and reports a consistent moderate correlation between education and level of knowledge.

A meta-analysis is basically a test of lots of tests.  In this study, it's 71 effect sizes published in 46 studies.  I did a meta-analysis once for a book chapter.  I'll never do another.  It's statistical hell.

So knowledge levels differ across "social strata," as the study reports.  But the study failed to find changes over time, even in increases of publicity, which is rather interesting and "does not offer strong support for the knowledge gap hypothesis," which rests solidly on the idea of changes as time progresses and information becomes more available. 

Now for a cool methodological moment.

A smaller gap was found when studies used "belief-type" measures, as "compared to awareness-type and factual-type measures."  Fact-based questions are harder, thus increasing the knowledge gap that exists between those of lower and higher SES.  This makes sense.  "Belief-type" measures are apparently when respondents were asked to list arguments and these were simply counted, regardless of the quality of those responses.  "Awareness-type" measures seem to be the ability to answer questions, even evaluations of candidates.  If an answer is provides, then you are "aware" of that person regardless of the quality of that response.  It's an interesting approach and one necessary given the wide number of studies examined in the meta-analysis.  So when people can just say stuff, SES matters less.  When they have to be accurate, SES matters more.

Blogging and the Knowledge Gap

Not all bloggers are created equal, according to a new study in The Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.  As the author concludes:

Consistent with knowledge gap hypothesis, bloggers with higher SES tend to produce more political knowledge and have more social power than lower-SES segments. Moreover, even among filter bloggers who produce more political knowledge, SES, gender, and print media use are associated with their social influences. This structural inequity within the virtual political space mirrors existing material and legitimized reality in U.S. politics.

The author breaks bloggers into two groups -- filter bloggers and personal journals -- and examine a knowledge production gap.  So, in reality, this is a knowledge gap study. 

Most "political" or "news" bloggers are reactive; that is, they offer mediated content, the stuff they've taken from news sites and added "value" or opinion or spin or whatever you choose to call it, depending I suppose on whether you agree or disagree with their partisan point of view.  But sometimes they offer unique or original knowledge, the most famous being Rathergate.

This study notes that personal journals far outnumber "filter blogs," and the author notes lots of other blogs exist.  What's interesting for me are the tables where the author shows what factors predict engaging in one kind of blog versus the other.  Read 'em yourself for details, but the results show knowledge being produced on the Internet by pretty much demographically speaking the same folks who generate knowledge in the MSM: older, better educated folks.  TV watching is positively associated with "personal" blogging but not "filter" blogging, which is kinda interesting.  Gotta watch TV to fill in that personal blog, I guess.

And for those of you with a partisan bent, I end with the following, which I find fascinating:

Overall, liberal bloggers have more incoming links while Republican bloggers have more daily hits. This finding looks odd at a first glance. However, it indicates a subtle difference between incoming links and hits. Whereas incoming links from other bloggers represent the popularity of a blog in the blogosphere, daily hits demonstrate the actual number of visits a blog has and its reach in the general cyberspace. The hits a blog receives come not only from other bloggers or other content producers, but from other Internet users who may or may not engage in online authoring. This suggests that liberal bloggers are more powerful in the blogosphere while Republican bloggers have more power throughout the Internet.

-
Full cite: Lu Wei, Filter blogs versus personal journals:
Understanding the Knowledge Production Gap on the
Internet.  Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
14 (2009) 532–558.

Social Media Attract the Affluent and Urban

The headline says it all.  Story here.  Facebookers, in particular, tend to be "largely upscale."  So will we have an emerging Social Media Gap to rival the old Knowledge Gap?  Or maybe the Digital Divide?

Education and Political Knowledge

A study in the latest Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media points out how important education is in understanding how different media help people learn about politics and public affairs. The study by Grabe, Kamhawi and Yegiyan examines how medium (TV, newspaper, web) interacts with education to predict different levels of learning.

No surprise, if you're immersed in this literature, that they found participants with greater education got more out of the print versions and those of lower education got more out of the TV version. Oddly they didn't hypothesize this, despite a recent consensus among scholars that TV best serves those who know little (or have less cognitive ability -- measured badly by education). That's a quibble about what otherwise is a pretty damn good study, especially in the part where they examined effects over time, something you don't often see.

The study is framed in the knowledge gap hypothesis and the tongue twisting LC3MP, which I first thought was a character from Star Wars but instead is Limited Capacity Model of Mediated Message Processing. Not sure what the hell the 3 is all about, but the model is basically a fancy mass comm restating of a history of social cognitive work on how much, or how little, we can process at one time.

So what's it all mean? First, education is just a surrogate for cognitive ability, and not a particularly good one. Indeed one study found an interviewer's estimation of a respondent's cognitive ability to be a better predictor of how well respondents did in a survey than their level of education. So education is a blunt instrument, but it does suggest the importance of TV news for those who don't know much, or spend a great deal following, public affairs. It helps close the gap that would otherwise exist if only print news existed. And it shows how important print is for those with greater cognitive ability, those who want more depth and context and actual news.

Political Knowledge, in Africa

Much of our attention is on studies of what people know in western democracies. Hell, let's get to the point -- most studies are about political knowledge in America. You'll come across a few UK studies, maybe one from Europe or Australia or even South Korea, but little else.

Along comes this little 2008 gem from the International Journal of Public Opinion Research, which uses Afrobarometer data gathered in Mali to investigate the predictors of political knowledge.

The author, Erik Nisbet, notes some key differences in his findings from those seen in other studies. First off, newspaper reading has no direct effect on political knowledge, unlike in western democracies. This is probably due to lower literacy rates, a hypothesis supported by positive relationships seen between radio and TV news use and knowledge gain. There is an interaction effect for newspaper and education, suggesting that people with higher levels of schooling do get information from newspapers. This makes sense, and I've seen it elsewhere.

What's more interesting to me is the lack of a relationship between any form of media use and "democratic orientations" (supporting democratic ideals). There is also some fascinating discussion of the "knowledge gap" that is the main thrust of the piece.

I also found interesting the results on political participation. For people low in education, listening more and more to radio news did little or nothing to increase their political participation. Higher educated respondents, though, showed a remarkable increase as their radio use increased. Again I've seen similar stuff in my own data, but this suggests that anyone studying media consumption habits and political factors need to look hard at these interactions, which sometimes remain hidden in the data.

Civic Literacy

A report suggests that students at elite universities are either dumb or not getting their money's worth, at least when it comes to the ability to answer basic civics questions accurately. The questions focus on America's history and institutions, the kind of stuff we ask in surveys to discover what people know, their basic "civics" or "textbook" knowledge.

Who sucked? Yale, Duke, and Cornell.

Who kicked ass? Eastern Conn. State University, Marian College in Wisconsin and Murray State in Kentucky.

The appendix to this study is damned confusing. What the hell is "value added" and why are the numbers lower for the supposedly bad performers? It's not explained very well and like a lot of pr releases, the quality is -- ahem -- missing. And there is probably some political axe to grind her, one I don't have the time or energy to chase down. And there is the question of how well those Yale, et al., kids might do compared to those Marian College grads in synthisizing a lot of information and composing arguments.

In other words, it's unclear what we're measuring here other than ability to answer straightforward factual questions. Still, you'd think those Ivy guys and gals would do better. Wassup with that?

Take the quiz yourself if you want to be humbled.

Oh, and my school, The University of Georgia, scored #32. Beat out again by the University of Florida, at #22.

At least we beat Duke.

The Gender Knowledge Gap

Men know more than women. That's a fairly universal finding in tests of political knowledge, a gender gap most scholars prefer to leave undiscussed.

There are a lot of potential explanations for the gender gap in what people know about public affairs. A study that attempts to answer at least some of the reasons for the gap makes for interesting reading. To quote the authors, "the gender disparity on political knowledge is large, and the gap persists in multivariate analyses." Translation: even if you statistically control for lots of other stuff like education, it's still there.

Okay, but why?

Rather than delve into the sociological waters of how boys and girls are raised and trained and brought into political life, the authors instead look at something more simple -- measurement.
Men are more reluctant to say they don't know when asked a survey question. Pluck out the "don't knows" and half of the gender knowledge gap disappears. Poof. Gone. And because men will try and answer you get a "guessing effect" in the results. There's a lot more here in the study, so check it out yourself.

Basically, we men don't ask directions and we don't say we "don't know" if asked a knowledge question on a survey. In both cases, we're willing to guess.