Studying Tea Baggers II

I blogged previously about how scholars might go about studying the tea bag movement, at least with a survey approach, and along the way I rattled off some possible ways we might measure self-identification as a tea bagger, or at least as a sympathizer with the movement.

We could ask folks if they consider themselves part of the movement in a yes-no format, but that's unsatisfying.  We could ask them how closely they identify with the movement and get some 1-to-7 scale to provide more statistical power.   We could ask about some tea bag movement favorite topics (big government, socialism, birther issues about Obama, etc.), but I'm not sure we could capture, or afford to capture, all the issues both serious and wacky that causes individuals to identify with the movement or attend rallies.

What I failed to get into earlier was the media angle to such research.

The obvious one is where people get their news.  We'd offer all the favorites, from Fox to CNN to Limbaugh to Letterman, your basic measures of media exposure.  But I'd also want measures of attitudes toward the news media because I suspect we'd find a lot of interesting explanatory power in those "trust" items.

I'd want to go deeper.

I'd create a matrix in which respondents compared major news sources against one another.  How much is CNN like Fox?  CNN like MSNBC?  CNN like the major broadcast networks?  Etc. etc.  In other words, pick a good dozen likely news sources and -- I admit this would take forever in a phone survey -- compare each item against all the others.  The end result?  Multidimentional scaling would take the data and paint us a pretty picture of how tea baggers versus, I suppose, non-baggers, view the mediaverse.  You could do this in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space.  This is kinda cool stuff -- which proves my inner-geek, but also informative at how folks organize the media world in their heads.

Of course that's too many questions for an ANES survey, which honestly would struggle in a pool of a couple of thousand randomly selected folks to get more than a coupla hundred tea baggers.  So that's out.  This calls for going into the field, to those wacky rallies, and wrestling down some respondents.

The results would be fascinating.

Studying Tea-Baggers

The tea bag movement is big, broad, loud, a bit kooky, damned angry, and manages to combine brutal honesty with absolute dishonesty under one big fat crazy tent.  It's a helluva story from a journalist's point of view, a helluva opportunity from a political operative's point of view, and a helluva topic for research from a scholar's point of view.

Let's focus on the latter.

If you were prepping a study on the movement, let's say a survey, how would you identify someone as a tea-bagger?  By a preference for Earl Grey?  No, that won't work.  Can we simply ask respondents how much they identify with the movement?  Yeah, maybe, and that's a start, but I think you'd be tempted to also list off a bunch of "tea bag" concerns to see what people think about them.  The problem is the movement itself seems more a confederation of frustrated folks who don't all agree on what it is they're frustrated about -- though fears of "big government" may be the single overriding factor.

I think you'd want two or three "identification" items designed to find out how close or attached people feel toward the movement, not unlike how we measure attitudinal proximity or membership to the traditional political parties.  You might also want to tap into the four or five (at least) major themes that tend to bubble up at tea party gatherings, such as big government, but that gets tricky too.  Some are the "Obama is not American" kooks.  While it's fun to ask those kinds of questions, do they tell us much theoretically about the movement itself?  No, from an academic standpoint -- which is different than a journalistic or political approach, we'd want to know what underlying characteristics, even personality constructs, drive someone to become a tea bagger.  I suspect we might see some of the Gamson hypothesis (but also see this brilliant piece of research) stuff going on here, a combination of frustration and anger with high self efficacy, and the roots of that frustration is what academics should be studying in more detail because I think it goes deeper than mere fear of Obama.

But fear is a good place to start.

There are of course lots of scales out there that tap into some of the root issues, from efficacy to trust to -- yup -- fear.  I'm afraid we're missing a lot of this, in part because the major data collection moments have passed.  ANES did its pre- and post-election stuff, but rarely do you find systematic data collection a year or so after an election, so we may find ourselves studying the tea bag movement a year or two after its big moment, relying on memories rather than "in the moment" data collection. And that's too bad.