Kinds of Political Knowledge -- A Finnish Study

There's this interesting study out of Finland that examines an age-old question -- do the media matter when it comes to what people know?  And on top of that, the authors argue the kind of knowledge you measure can make a difference in media effects.

This study looks specifically at newspapers.  Exposure (or attention) to newspapers is generally associated with political knowledge.  The more you read, the more you know, or at least the better you do on tests scholars come up with to measure political knowledge.  The authors look at something they call overall knowledge and something they call structural knowledge.  The former is exactly what it sounds like, a lot of different questions used to create an overall index.  The latter is based on questions about the structure of government, in this case such questions as the task of the prime minister and some of the principles of the parliamentarian system.

What did they find?  Newspaper reading largely disappears as a predictor of political knowledge once you enter a bunch of other socio-demographic-political factors into the model.  The authors appear more surprised by this than I am, but let's give them the benefit of the doubt.  This lack of an effect really shows up in their structural knowledge dependent variable. 

Why?  Because they're misthinking this thing.  Structural knowledge is best thought of not as a dependent variable, at least not in a news media sense, but as an independent control variable.  It would be a great dependent variable if you were studying civics classes, but here it's best thought of as a control factor to see what people know about current events or that sort of thing.  Still, it's another piece of the puzzle.

Newspaper MeasuresA Methodological Moment

I blogged a day or so ago about an interesting study that looks at local versus national political knowledge, the role media play, and the important socio-demographic differences that emerge depending on which kind of knowledge you examine.  Now I'd like to spend a few words discussing a key, yet odd, variable in that study -- newspaper delivery.

Permit me a methodological moment.

In studies such as this we typically see newspaper exposure, traditionally measured on that old, tired, yet sturdy 0-to-7 days a week a respondent says he or she reads the newspaper.  An improvement on this exposure measure is attention.  That is, for those who report at least some exposure, how much do you attend to it.  This is particularly helpful in studying television news, less so for print.  And yet the study I linked to above uses, instead, newspaper delivery.

What are the advantages or disadvantages?

• Advantage I -- a respondent is less likely to exaggerate.  In other words, we often say we do some socially-acceptable task, like reading the paper or watching PBS, when perhaps we don't, or at least we don't do it as many days as we brag.  So this "delivery" measure helps.
• Disadvantage I -- but, we end up with a dichotomous variable versus a continuous one.  A 0-to-7 scale is richer than a 0,1 scale in so many ways.
• Disadvantage II -- and, many people read a newspaper at work, at the office.  The pass-along number boasted by the newspaper industry is about 2.3, as high as 2.5, meaning two or three people read a single issue of the paper.  The "delivery" item misses at least some of those folks.
• Advantage II -- but, there's less error (statistically speaking) in that 0,1 measure.  Cleaner results, I suspect.  No weird distributions.
• Disadvantage III -- and yet, and yet ... no one uses "delivery" so it's difficult to say how the results here fit with previous studies.  And use of key secondary data sets, such as Pew or ANES, will not give you a similar measure; those folks use some version of exposure and/or attention.  Hard to reproduce.

In all, I'm not enamored of the "deliver" item, and it loses above in a close game, 3-2. 

The "delivery" item has SES issues, I believe.  It also misses a lot of folks who may read the paper elsewhere.  But it does reduce some of the error from people overinflating their reading of the newspaper.  So you win something, you lose something.  But I believe, overall, you lose a bit too much to make it a viable replacement for exposure (even with all its flaws).

Down Under Citizenship

In politics, participation and knowledge are intertwined. One leads to the other, feeds the other, creates what some call a virtuous circle.

According to this report, not everyone -- in this case young Australians -- are all that excited about voting (the ultimate participatory act).

Here's the first two graphs:

Australian youth are showing extreme apathy towards their right to vote, with 20 per cent not enrolled to vote, and close to half saying they wouldn't vote if it wasn't compulsory, new University of Sydney research shows.

However the research found that if your kids attend a private school, study politics or civics, and engage with their school community, then they're more likely to vote come election time.

Specifically on media and political communication:

The study also looked at where young people gain their knowledge of Australian politics. Over the past two decades, the number of young people relying on the media for information has declined, with students favouring advice from parents and teachers. In spite of this, the study found newspapers' reputations remain strong, declaring them, "the most effective source of political knowledge."

We are certainly seeing a massive shift in where people get their news, especially young people. They get it from friends, they get it from Facebook postings, they read a tweet or two from Twitter, they scan headlines and they, sometimes, actually read. Print is superior. There's no doubt. But depth reading of print is going down, which is too bad.

Anyway, interesting that we're seeing many of the same changes regardless of the nation studied. Not sure that's comforting, but it is interesting.

Summing Up IV

This the fourth in (maybe) five installments this week to sum up what we know about the relationship between media use and political knowledge. Monday it was TV news, Tuesday entertainment faux news programs, Wednesday I discussed radio.

Today -- newspapers.

You know, those smushed-tree and ink things they quaintly toss on driveways in your neighborhood. That old guy down the street, he gets one. Hobbles out every morning in his robe, stoops down and groans while farting, hobbles back to his kitchen table to suck down coffee and figure out what the hell happened in the world yesterday.

That's a newspaper -- yesterday's news tomorrow.

I love papers. I worked at three daily newspapers in my unstellar journalism career. Covered cops and courts and politics and government and schools and a bunch of other stuff. Took pix. Wrote features. Even did some obits. Had a helluva time, but that's all beside the point here, which is how do newspapers fit in with political knowledge.

If you read previous studies you find this nice, modest, statistically significant relationship between reading the newspaper and what people know. In part this can be explained by the demographics of newspaper readers: older, more interested, more educated. In part this can be explained by the way we approach print as an active process versus how we approach the screen, a more passive process. In part it's the depth of information on a newspaper's front page and inside pages, far more than you get from TV. The old saying was that you'd find as much info on the front page of a newspaper than in 20 minutes of TV, and that's kinda true and kinda false, but it's also beyond our discussion here.

BUT ... and this is a major but, the way newspaper journalists tend to write stories, via the inverted pyramid, makes it difficult for young or uninterested readers to figure out what the hell is going on. A summary lede is fine and I love it dearly, but it sucks for some readers who do not have the context or background knowledge to understand what it's talking about.

Now here I'm talking the paper version, not the online version, but there's a cool study that compared the same exact NYT story in print and on a screen. They measured knowledge from reading the same exact story. And found ... (drum roll please) ... that people learned more from the print version. Holy dominance of print, Batman! Why? I believe again that it has everything to do with the way we approach a printed product versus one on the screen (or boob tube). There is some work to support this.

Anyway, put newspaper exposure into a multivariate model, control for all the other usual suspects in predicting political knowledge, and you'll often find newspaper reading still holds some significance. Small, modest, but often statistically significant at that magical p<.05.

But as newspaper reading drops, and online grazing replaces it, we'll see these relationships disappear in future studies.

Why? Because people will say they read newspapers online, but that exposure will reflect grazing that we all tend to do online versus a deeper, longer soak we tend to do on paper, and also will reflect the seriousness we read a paper product versus a screen product. In the long run, the relationship between "reading news" and political knowledge will -- in my humble estimation -- disappear.

Watch for it.

Newspapers and Knowledge

PR release for Newspaper Research Journal article that finds more or less the usual thing, that young people have dropped the paper over time. The authors used ANES data from 1948-2004 (which has crappy media items in the cumulative data set, particularly problematic in 1974). Here's an intersting bit from the release:

The researchers conclude that “because young Americans rarely read newspapers anyway, the lack of using [the] medium does not affect their political knowledge.”

Full disclosure: I'm on the editorial board of NRJ.