The Mess of Methodology

Doing social science is fun and frustrating, but nothing is as difficult as nailing your methodology. I work in media effects and political knowledge. It's messy stuff trying to tease out relationships, so when I saw this New York Times piece today about drinking and health, it struck me as eerily familiar. As you may know, drinking in moderation is often associated with health benefits. But ... moderate drinkers also tend to not smoke, to exercise, and either avoid or do all the stuff you're supposed to avoid or do to stay healthy.

So does booze really help? I like to think so. Helps me rationalize my evenings with wine, beer, bourbon, or of course the daddy of all drinks -- single-malt Scotch.

But I'm talking research methodology. Or as a sociologist quoted in the article says:

“The moderate drinkers tend to do everything right — they exercise, they don’t smoke, they eat right and they drink moderately,” said Kaye Middleton Fillmore, a retired sociologist from the University of California, San Francisco, who has criticized the research. “It’s very hard to disentangle all of that, and that’s a real problem.”

Yup. The same can be said for studying what people know. Knowledgeable folks in the first place tend to learn more from the same material than those with little knowledge. Motivation is a huge factor, as is cognitive ability (often measured as formal education, but that's problematic as well).

Disentangling all that equals heartache or a lifetime job. I'm going with the latter, though I often feel the former -- which usually means I need a drink.

Meaning Making

We all engage in meaning making. Scholars from widely different fields have widely different approaches to the question of how people make sense of their social and political world. Most of us use some form of heuristics, rules-of-thumb, shortcuts, schemata, chronically accessible constructs, and a host of other theoretical fictions to help us tame the information tide (to borrow a book title). I'm sure there are others I've missed, but they all share in common the idea that we can't possibly cope with the world in all its complexity, so we find shortcuts to help us make sense of what we see and hear (and taste, and smell, and feel, if I want to be fair to all the senses).

These are more than mere shortcuts -- they come rich with meaning. We impress meaning on what we see and hear and then fit it to our own expectations and predispositions. Doesn't fit? Oh, we'll make it fit, we'll get that round peg into a square hole even if we have to change what we actually heard or saw. Selective attention, meet selective memory.

Why am I going on about this? In part because I've been reading student papers from my Public Opinion graduate seminar, in part because I've been reading the "who hates the most, liberals or conservatives?" nonsense on the web and papers, and in part because I needed blog material for today.

But it comes down to this: What people know, unfortunately, is often a function of what they want to know, or what they want it to mean.

Who Hates More?

Radio/TV intellectual heavyweight Glenn Beck says liberals hate more and are to blame for recent shootings. NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman, who only has a paltry Nobel in economics, says conservatives hate more and are to blame.

All together: You hate more than I do!

I was going to spend some time looking at the psychology of hate, but today has been spent dealing with domesticity (lawn mowing, picking up a kid who has been away for a week, etc.), so I have no semi-thoughtful nuggets to share other than it's obvious who wins this debate -- no one. Even if some rightwingnutjobs may be creating an Obamahate environment that indirectly might possibly be associated with the abortion clinic and Holocaust museum shootings (and that's a pretty compelling hypothesis no matter your ideological/partisan position), it doesn't really solve anything.

Remember the 90s? Oklahoma City? Clinton blaming talk radio? Do we see a parallel here, a Democratic prez who disgusts the wingnuts, and a pair of even bigger wingnuts take a few hundred lives in the process? Yeah, kinda. Enough to make you wonder.

What most people know is that the loonies on the left and the wackos on the right are best left alone, like a snarling dog with a frothy mouth and angry eyes. But some of the wingnuts are on TV and radio, on "respected" networks, so the rest of us will be left to clean up the mess. I don't really know much about the psychology of hate, it's not my research area, so I can't say much about that, but I do know something about media effects and anyone who suggests the Becks of the world are not somehow, indirectly, encouraging this ... they don't know much about media effects.

But this yelling about who hates more? Accomplishes nothing.

The Daily Show and The New York Times

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
End Times
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Newt Gingrich Unedited Interview

Very funny segment by The Daily Show and its visit to The New York Times, and now a long of discussion of whether it was (1) a good idea, or (2) a great idea, or (3) the worst idea ever, to let the show into the hallowed building.

Obviously, good idea. And I side with those who argue that the big with Jason Jones picking up a landline phone -- "I'm a reporter from the '80s, makin' sure everything's factual; oh, you guys are like a walking Colonial Williamsburg" -- says something positive about journalists who actually check stuff before they go with it, who try to get (borrowed phrase) the "best obtainable version of the truth."

Anyway, it's a funny episode. Watch, and enjoy. And then go read the Times.

Consumer Confidence

I always like to look at the various measures of consumer confidence and optimism. You'll find a nice batch of them here at that marvelous site, pollingreport.com. The TIPP indicators are above 50, which is mildly optimistic (on a 100-point scale). But the ABC News consumer comfort index is stuck in the negatives, -47 at last measure, a tick up from -49 a month ago. That scale goes from -100 to +100, so -47 kinda sucks. A little more complicated is the Consumer Board's confidence index, but it shows nice improvement and optimism of late.

Who cares? We can see the stock market is struggling to rally (Dow up 73 points as I write this) but a lot of people are carefully watching consumer spending. Until it shows up, other problems won't be solved easily, such as unemployment or tax revenues for local and state governments. What people know about the economy is in part based on their own lives, part based on what they see down the street or downtown, and in part what they consume in the media. The green shoots argument that we've hit bottom and see sprigs of life, seems to be true. Or at least as a perception.

Rational Inattention

Here's a brief blog post with a nifty title: Rational Inattention to Politics. This is not a new idea -- it's been outlined and discussed and formulated by scholars for decades (see Downs, for example, back in 1957). But it deserves a shout-out, especially on a day when I'm pressed to keep up with the readings in the Public Opinion seminar I teach in three hours. In other words, this pretty much sums up my blog for the day. Sorry.

Process Journalism?

There's been a minor squabble of sorts after a New York Times column probed the question of how to handle rumors. This was a perfectly reasonable approach to the question, but some in the blogosphere do not take kindly to even a hint of criticism (and really, it was just a hint).

There's this response, which is kinda reasonable though a bit misguided. And journalism prof/uber blogger Jeff Jarvis fired this somewhat less reasonable and a tad more misguided response. But Jarvis did point out something I found interesting, the dichotomy of product versus process journalism.

Now my gut reaction to process journalism is to ask: isn't that journalism that isn't ready to be published yet? Oh,and there's a good response to all this here that's worth reading.

Never mind the journalism side of this. While I'm a journalism prof this blog is not really so much about how we go about the business of finding stuff out than it is about the effects of the stuff we tell people about. What people know. In discussing this I am somewhat steeped in the deep literature of how people learn about politics and public affairs and the consequences of that knowledge (or lack of knowledge).

And so setting aside most of the blogorreah, let's go with the idea of process journalism, something that ebbs and flows, in which lots of people participate, in which thinly sourced material finds its way into publication because, dammit, someone may have possibly said it or at least thought about saying it, or maybe it is potentially true even if no one admits it. Let's assume this is a good thing (and I'm being a bit unfair here and I'm actually a little sympathetic to the notion).

What are the consequences?

My reading of serious scholarly work from social psychology, mass communication, political science, sociology, and a host of other fields that touch on how people learn and what they do with that knowledge suggests this kind of "reporting" is about as bad an idea as you can possibly come up with -- that is if you're worried about the consequences of your actions. If you're not, if you want to go with rumors that later turn out wrong because the system is self-correcting, then you fail to really understand how people process communication, how they make sense of the world. First we have all these filters that affect what we learn of the political and social world, and then we have the primacy/recency effect, and then we have selective exposure and attention and retention and memory that influence not just what we see or read, but how we use it inside our black box brains. Go with rumors? Sure, if you don't care about misinforming people who tend to remember that kind of information and not later information that fixes the problem you created in the first place. This also gets into concrete versus abstract information and memory.

The bottom line -- while there is fascinating potential in this kind of news, the consequences on real actual living breathing people are not good. We're not wired that way, and What Would Google Do is not going to change the way we process, retain, and use information.