When you get my age, a favorite pastime is to bitch about how young people today, they don't know nuthin.  In that spirit I offer this New York Times story that confirms to the world that young people today, they don't know nuthin.

Based on this survey, the story points out a few distressing factoids:

• Three-quarters of high school seniors could not name a power granted to Congress by the Constitution
• Fewer than half knew the purpose of the Bill of Rights
• Only 1-in-ten knew anything about the checks and balances among the three branches of government.

Which leads us to suspect that young people today, they don't know nuthin.  As the NYT story reports:

“Today’s NAEP results confirm that we have a crisis on our hands when it comes to civics education,” said Sandra Day O’Connor, the former Supreme Court justice, who last year founded icivics.org, a nonprofit group that teaches students civics through Web-based games and other tools.  

Of course we don't really test on civics knowledge, at least not in a world of No Child Left Untested. My own high school children would do well, but they have the advantage of taking AP American History and a class in Government.  Apparently most do not, because some of the questions are so straightforward as to be, well, straightforward.

Young People and the News

We've known for quite a while that young people tune out the news, or at least the news offered in traditional formats.  There was a brief book on this that, while it received more attention than it deserved, was the right topic at the right time -- so it really struck a chord.  Now here's an article that sums up how technology isn't necessarily drawing younger folks to the news. 

There has always been an "age effect" when studying political knowledge, what people know, and if younger Americans continue their disinterest toward news, then this gap will increase.  But it's not quite that simple.  We're seeing hints of young folks picking up bits and pieces of news from social networking sites, from haphazard exposure to aggregators like Yahoo News, and all the rest.  So it may not be as bad as we think, calling of course for that phrase all scholars love to hear -- deserves more research.

Young Adults Worry About College

Given the economy, can young people afford to stay in college?  A report that summarizes a survey of 3,000 young adults suggests this is a serious concern.

Said the report:

"Millions of young people are losing faith in government, politics and in many cases--the American dream."

News by Youth

We talk a lot in the news biz about attracting and keeping a young audience, but here's a case of a couple of fairly young people taking over a small newspaper -- a pair of 22-year-olds.  Cool.

Youth, Participation, and Knowledge

There was greater political participation by young people in the 2008 presidential election but that did not necessarily translate into greater political knowledge, according to a news study (press release here).

First, some caveats. This study was done by graduate students. It was presented at the recent AEJMC convention (I'm a member). So I can't say a lot about the method, because I skipped this year's convention in Boston. Caveats aside, we can either read the press release or wait until the papers themselves become available online. It's basically a study of undergraduates -- who as we all know barely qualify as real people. And there's this little bit of info near the end of the release: "the study has limitations, particularly since the students were not selected from a random sample." Yup. Okay for a conference paper, harder to sell as a journal article.

Here's an interesting quote from the press release:

"We found that the students were really politically active," York said. "They talked about the campaigns with their friends, and a lot of people got online on a social networking site to talk about the campaigns. Not many wrote blogs, but a considerable amount kept up with blogs."

This gets at the difference in what is participation. We'd normally define it as attending rallies, contributing money, putting a bumpersticker on your car, that sort of traditional thing, but there is movement to include social networking, Internet-based activities as participation.

"The measure for political knowledge was similar to a current events quiz with questions like the name of the U.S. secretary of defense," according to the release. That's okay too, though as I've discussed many times before in previous blogs, it's just one form of political knowledge.

What Canadian Youth Know

Stumbled across this editorial about Canada's youth and what they know. The graph that caught my eye follows:

Teenagers have received a bad rap for their political knowledge when actually they probably know more than their parents. Bonin and other youth have access to the Internet and in addition with expansion of airlines, are able to travel to other cultures. Nowadays, youth are able to go beyond only dreaming of far away places and can actually access information immediately online (italics added).

Mostly, young people don't so much know stuff as they are now better equipped to find stuff out. In other words, ask them a political question and the response might be: "I don't know, but I know how to find out."

Whether that's a form of knowledge is a matter of some debate and academic inquiry. Is knowing how to find out a piece of information the same as actually knowing it? I don't think so, not at least in that piece of information's utility. In other words, merely knowing how to find a piece of information does me little good in processing the news, of gleaning some useful information from what I read or hear on TV. Whether Google is changing the way we think, that's a topic covered quite nicely in an Atlantic piece some months ago (that it's making us stupid) and again recently (it's making us smarter). But all in all, knowing how to looking something up (online or otherwise) helps us little in making sense of the world as a story flits across the screen.

It's a topic I'd love to examine further, if my hunch is right that young people indeed take this approach. I'm just not quite sure how to attack the research question.

Even in Japan?

I've pointed to and blogged about what people know in the U.S., in the U.K., in various countries of Europe. Even Africa. So add Japan to the list. Like many, this brief piece is about the political knowledge of young people, a consistent concern no matter what country we look at.

As news consumption among the young suffers, so apparently does their political knowledge, or at least our perception of their political knowledge. As I've discussed many times before, sometimes this is right on target, sometimes it has more to do with the kinds of questions we ask rather than the answers they give. In truth this also explains, in part, the consistent finding that females know less about politics than males -- ask questions in which respondents are asked to identify female politicians and women do very well, thank you. I suspect if we construct political knowledge indices having to do with the public affairs issues that matter to younger adults then we may see a very different result. Certainly young people did better than ever before on quizzes about the recent U.S. election, an Obama effect.

It's another year, and the story remains the same. I'll try for something fresh in a couple of days, once I recover from overeating and over drinking and overspending.

Civic Engagement

Getting young people engaged in the political process has long been a focus of scholars, advocates, and of course politicians and political parties who desperately seek their precious votes.

But do celebrities help in getting people involved?

One study suggests yes, they do. Celebrity endorsements of political engagement can make a difference, though one that is probably short-lived, by attracting young people who often identify with those celebrities. These endorsements led to higher self-efficacy and lower complacency among young respondents as part of a study in the 2004 campaign. The end result was more engagement.

That's the good news, though it being short-lived is probably the bad news. The theory is that once we get people used to participating or voting, they'll do it again and again. Addiction theory at its best, but the data suggest otherwise.

And again I say it -- damn those data. I need a bumper sticker with that line, or maybe a t-shirt.

It'll be interesting to see the 2008 version of this study, what with Barack Obama's attraction to younger voters. I suspect in 2008 celebrity endorsements of engagement were almost redundant to Obama's candidacy and had no real effect. Again, we'll have to let the data tell us the tale.

A WSJ piece looks at research on young people and how technology has altered the way they think, behave, and process information. I've not read the original research yet, just this column about it. Some interesting stuff:

The research paints a generally encouraging picture. Those in the 12- to 30-year-old cohort prize freedom of choice, like to customize everything they do, collaborate, value integrity, and can live more easily than their parents with information overload and constant innovation. Mr. Tapscott argues that in contrast to earlier generations that took in information passively, such as through television, this generation "has been flooded with information, and learning to access, sort, categorize and remember it all has enhanced their intelligence." They "have had to search for, rather than simply look at, information."

There is some suggestion of how patient younger people will be with Obama if he reverts to "politics as usual," as well as interesting ideas on how people learn. If I read the updated Growing Up Digital I will blog about it in more detail, but my own sense from other data is young people learn in very different ways that drive some of us crazy.

My take -- they tend to be skimmers rather than deep readers, searchers rather than seekers, and are more capable at learning about something than they are learned in the classical sense. What does that all mean? Tomorrow, more thoughts.

Going Newsless

People don't read the newspaper as much as they used to. Nor do they watch as much TV news.

But wait! There's the Internet! We're saved!

Despite a growth in the ways to find out what's happening in the world, the proportion of young people who get no news has grown. Among 18-24 year olds, the proportion who went newsless increased from 1998 to 2008, from 25 to 34 percent. That's a scary number. From what was one-quarter of young people going newsless has grown to one-third of young people.

What's worse -- they're not alone.

Nearly every age group shows a growth in no news, all except the 50-64 year olds. Thank goodness for that brilliant and stunning age group.

The growth in online news consumption is not making up the difference. Not in time spent, and for struggling news organizations, not in advertising dollars either.

So when we ask what people know, the answer may turn out to be -- not a helluva lot.

Media, Talk, and What People Know

There has been a growing body of scholarly work that examines our interpersonal networks as opposed to media consumption as reasons for what we think, how we act, and what we learn. Some of it I've covered before, such as the fact that our personal networks are more and more made up of people like ourselves. Thus we tend to think our viewpoints are shared by more people, when it turns we are merely getting a reflection of our own views.

Neat stuff. One study looks at young people and the role of talking to friends about politics versus using the media. The results are not surprising. Or maybe they are.

1. Young people use the media to have something to talk about with friends, but they learn more from these conversations than they do from the media.
2. Give young people a little information and they often want more, especially if that initial information is engaging (like a debate, so we'll find out if the infamous YouTube debates matter in later research. I'm guessing ... maybe).
3. Conflicting information baffles young people. This is probably due in part to their lack of base information, so they struggle to deal with competing arguments. The study doesn't address this, but I can see a problem here. What if young people, who struggle with conflicting info, say the hell with it and search out a single source to tell them like it is? The result is a lack of exposure to competing arguments. Not good for them, not good for democracy.
4. Young people love the Internet. This may have something to do with the findings in #3 above, because the Net is full of conflict, kinda like talk radio on acid.
5. Over a third of young people report talking about politics on a daily basis. Wow! News organizations need to find a way to tap into this and sell the idea that they can provide young people with info for those conversations. This is an old uses and gratifications approach, for those of a PhDweeb persuasion.
6. Young people see the mainstream news media as somewhat credible, but less than their friends. Not a good development.

Overall, this study and a host of others are looking at media, personal networks, and young people to help us understand what the opinion climate might look like in a few years. After reading a lot of this stuff, I'd like to say I'm hopeful. I'd like to say we'll be okay.

I''d like to, but I can't.