Accepted for Publication

Hollander, Barry A. (forthcoming), The role of media use in the recall versus recognition of political knowledge. Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.

The only thing missing in the title above is a colon. Without one, you kinda doubt it's actual scholarly research.
 
What's it about (you ask breathlessly)?

Glad you asked.

I used a question-wording experiment in a national survey to see whether recognition-type political knowledge questions (multiple choice) get different results than recall-type questions (open-ended). First, of course they do. Everyone knows multiple guess is easier than short answer questions. I hypothesize something more -- that people who rely on TV news will do better on recognition questions but people who rely on print will do better on recall.

It worked. Mostly. For TV news exposure, it predicts recognition (but not recall) knowledge. Print newspapers and radio do nothing. But using Internet for news predicts recall (but not recognition) knowledge. And yes, this was a multivariate analysis, meaning I controlled statistically for all the usual suspects (age, income, education, political interest, etc.).

And to top it all off, among the less educated, TV plays a bigger role in recognition knowledge than it does for those with greater education.

There's a bunch of theory stuff in the paper, but basically TV news is all about recognition, is all about being an information leveler for less educated (or interested). Recall requires deeper attention. What's interesting is exposure to paper newspapers does nothing and it seems to have been supplanted by Internet news as a predictor of knowledge. That alone is kinda fascinating, in a PhDweeby kind of way.

This will all appear in a journal near you, sometime in 2014. 

 

Revisited: Recall vs. Recognition

I've written quite a bit about the differences between recall and recognition when it comes to measuring political knowledge (see, for example, here).  I've also published research on the topic.  Well, I'm back.

First, a quick-and-dirty theory/methodology lesson.  Recognition tests are the ones we often see in survey research, such as "Who is the Vice-President?" and four choices given.  Recall questions are harder.  "Who is the Vice President?" with respondents required to generate a name from memory, that's a cognitively more challenging question. 

Case in point:  John Boehner, the Speaker of the House.

In some national data I am analyzing now, a random half of the respondents were asked to name the Speaker of the House and were provided four names (a recognition question).  The other half of respondents were provided the name John Boehner and asked "what job or political office does he now hold?"  That's recall. 

As you'd expect, fewer people got the recall question correct.

Only about half of those asked the harder recall question managed to identify Boehner as the Speaker of the House.  However, on the recognition question, 70 percent got it right.  I am still coding other similar questions (VP, for example), cleaning data, and then I'll turn my attention to the predictors of who gets the recall versus the recognition questions correct.  Setting aside a host of other likely predictors, based on theory, I expect respondents who rely more heavily on print media to do better on the recall question as compared to the recognition question.  In other words, I'm guessing (hypothesizing) that television news helps people with recognizing a political actor but not so much in free recall of his or her name (or office).

Anyone out there doing similar research, I'd love to hear from you.

I'll write a bit more on this as my research progresses, in part because it allows me to think aloud, in part because I'm curious as to whether others are also engaged in similar research.  There are several good recall vs. recognition studies out of advertising and marketing, but relatively few out of political science or political communication.

Knowledge Structures vs. Actual Knowledge

There is a fascinating study that argues, in part, that important theoretical differences and consequences exist between knowledge structures and actual knowledge.  Best of all, the authors cite my work on recall versus recognition.

What's a knowledge structure?  The authors argue that it is distinct from actual knowledge, yet related (much like I argued for recall and recognition).  Basically, you ask someone to list as many things as they can about a topic (say, Barack Obama).  The number of relevant responses are part of the knowledge structure.  Factual, or actual, knowledge is a more standard item, a set of questions settled on a priori and then asked of respondents.  The differences here are not new.  V.O. Key and Doris Graber long ago explored the important theoretical and methodological differences between what people know versus what social scientists ask them about what they know.  "The voters are not fools," Key famously said. 

The study also probes something called reflective integration as well as news consumption to explore all the relationships.  Tomorrow, I get at the results and their consequences -- methodologically, theoretically, and even for the real world question of what people know and how they use that information.

Recall and Recognition

I've blogged often (and published academic research) on the differences between the recall and the recognition of political information. These two forms of what people know differ not only methodologically but theoretically as well.  To put it simply -- and less PhDweebishly -- recall is one's ability to pull information out of memory with no help, a cognitively difficult task.  Recognition is like a multiple-choice test in which you're given a number of answers to choose from, a cognitively easier task.

Recall Example:  Who is Nancy Pelosi?
Recognition Example: Who is Nancy Pelosi?  Is she (a) Senate Majority Leader, (b) Speaker of the House, (c) a brand of underarm deoderant, (d) Secretary of State?

The first question, the recall example, is harder.  It would be even harder if you asked Who is the Speaker of the House? versus giving respondents a name to work with, but that's a different theoretical and methodological issue for another day (yeah, I did a paper on this, but it never got accepted ... damn those reviewers).

So why go on about recall vs. recognition?  There is a study in a 2009 issue of Political Behavior that examines knowledge about congressional candidates.  It's not actually a test of recall and recognition, but it includes both approaches and so I'm riffing off of it since it serves my purpose.  Full cite at bottom.

Here's a part I found kinda interesting.  The study includes a variable called media market concentration.  What's that?  When media markets straddle or bleed across congressional districts, you expect less knowledge about candidates since the coverage of any particular race is diluted.  When districts are better aligned with media markets, knowledge should improve (journalists are covering just one race).  That's the guts of this concept, though the method to create it is more complicated.  See the study for details.  

Their result?

When media market boundaries are well aligned with the boundaries of congressional districts, incumbents receive no particular benefit, but recognition of challengers is disadvantaged

Other than the awful, jargon-drunk use of disadvantaged here, people in districts where you'd expect higher knowledge because of alignment actually do a lousy job of recognizing challengers.  There's no relationship in recognition of incumbents (probably a ceiling effect).

In recall, they do not break it down by incumbents and challengers (not sure why), and in this case there is a negative relationship between accurate recall of all candidates and media concentration.  This is similar to above, where you have a non-significant relationship and a negative one, so it's no surprise -- I guess -- that an overall recall measure is negative.  This also points out the difficulty in improving recall versus recognition, especially in "media markets" defined by television, which is thought to improve recognition but not recall.

My take?  In reading the methods, the tables, and the study, at least when talking about media concentration, it seems to me the results support the idea that news media coverage helps a little on recognition but not at all with recall -- again supporting my discussion in the previous graph.

Full cite
Wolak, Jennifer (2009).  The consequences of concurrent campaigns for citizen knowledge of Congressional candidates.  Political Behavior, 31, 211-229.