Classrooms and Political Engagement

An "open classroom environment" can have positive effects on adolescent "civic knowledge and appreciation of political conflict," according to this study in the academic journal Political Behavior.

Okay, the first question from you budding methodologists is -- what's an open classroom environment? 

Table 1 of the study (page 443) outlines what is basically a classroom environment where kids feel comfortable asking questions, expressing opinions, and where teachers respect student opinion (or at least, I suppose, don't beat the crap out of the brats for mouthing off).  But yeah, I can buy this.  So does it make a difference?

Table 2 includes a monumentally long regression analysis to support the argument.  Classroom environment, even after all these statistical controls, does explain some unique variance -- PhDweebspeak for it is still a significant factor despite controlling for lots of other explanations (beta a mere .06, but significant despite all the other controls).  So what predicted civic knowledge among kids?  Classroom environment, obviously, but also significant factors were: expected education (how far you think you're going to go on in school), race, reading of books, discussing politics at home, and perception of the classroom environment, which is apparently different from actual environment.

What drops out as predictors of civic knowledge?

• Sex.  That's interesting given sex becomes a predictor for adults, with men scoring higher than women on tests of political knowledge (I've blogged on this research here and here).  But at this early age, no gender effect.  So the differences may emerge later.  Worthy of further investigation.
  
• News Media use.  At this age, less surprising.  Kids, even older ones, don't consume all that much news.  More meaningful would be the media habits of parents or guardians, but the data probed student use of media.
  
• Income and Free Lunch.  These essentially measure the same thing, which makes me worry about multicollinearity.  You can't get a free lunch at public schools unless your family is under the federal poverty level, so these two variables measure basically the same thing.  I would have taken out one from the model, gone with just the other. Or perhaps combine them in some way.
  
• Social studies.  Gasp!  Taking social studies has no effect?  Bad news for those who hope classes like these, which have largely disappeared due to No Child Left Untested, will save the day. 

In all, an interesting peek at kids versus the jillion of studies that examine U.S. adults.  I think there is some stuff above that make for interesting follow-up studies, in particular a further investigation of the sex differences in political knowledge scales.  Some good alternative explanations for that one have emerged of late (the kinds of questions asked, social learning, etc.).  More needs to be done.

Facebook and Political Engagement

I stumbled across this post that pointed me to this fascinating paper about Facebook and political engagement, including political knowledge, which was presented at APSA. 

Participation in online groups, according to the authors, "strongly predicts offline political participation by engaging members online." That's the good news.  The bad?  Facebook political discussions are unrelated to actual knowledge.

These results, the authors write, are "bitter-sweet."  While it's good that Facebook fosters engagement, the lack of improved knowledge is troubling.  Their content analysis of Facebook content provides a clue. 

The information content and quality of most wall posts were found to be very poor, generally lacking support for their claims, incoherent, or simply opinionated. In other words, group members are exposed to little new or well-articulated information about the political causes around which these groups form. The information is more likely to be reinforcing and therefore mobilizing, but not enlightening and therefore educational.

This is bad news for those of us hoping to see social media step up and be more than a way to waste one's time.  Engaging an uninformed public?  A next step, of course, would be to see whether the engagement prompted by Facebook use leads to seeking out information elsewhere.  The results here suggest not.

Reasons for Paying Attention

Citizens do need to be more engaged in politics, but the reasons for paying attention need to be clearer to them, the benefits of stronger citizenship must be more evident, and the opportunities to learn about politics more frequent, timely, and equitable.

- Michael X. Delli Carpini & Scott Keeter
What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters

The quote above, from an excellent book I've had shamelessly checked out of the university library now for a million years, gets right to the point I'll be addressing for the next few days -- the reasons for paying attention. For the average American, what are they? Do they still work? What does this mean for news, and for journalism? For democracy? Are we -- to steal a great book title -- Amusing Ourselves to Death?

This is serious stuff. I'll summarize much of what I've blogged about before, look at some of the more recent research, and ask why someone should even want to pay attention to the business of public affairs.

Stay tuned, or clicked, or whatever the hell it is you do for a blog.

Newspapers and Political Engagement

Excellent blog today by Alan Mutter about a case study of what happens when a city loses a daily newspaper. The gist? Political engagement (voting) decreases. A PDF of the study is here. An important part of what people know, or in this case, what they no longer get to know because of a daily paper going away.