Grazing

Grazing gets a bad rap. Let's face it, we all graze certain content: the TV news, dull conversations with family, memos from our boss. A couple of scholars looked specifically at news grazers, who they defined as people who watch the TV news with a remote in hand, ready to switch around when a story of little interest appears on the screen.

Yeah -- been there, changed that channel.

(btw: I didn't know the first remote, from Zenith, was called Lazy Bones. That's funny.)

Men graze more than women. Grazers are less likely to read the newspaper and, indeed, they are more likely to avoid any hard news of any type: local, national, international. As is now kinda obvious, grazers tend to know less about public affairs, at least as measured in the study. This makes sense. Inadvertent, haphazard exposure to news is simply not enough to be informed. What is not measured here is the difference between recall and recognition. Theoretically (yeah, I used the T-word), we would expect grazers to do better at recognition questions because they would have the answer on the tip of their tongue. Reading or carefully attending to the news would lead to higher recall scores (as is the case here).

The so what? Seventy percent of young people are grazers. They may feel informed through picking up bits and pieces here and there, from TV news or Jon Stewart or the web, but grazing doesn't lead to actually being informed. Grazing works well only for cows.

Unsure

In presidential politics we always watch the swing votes, the "unsure" voters, those wacky undecided folks who, despite a billion ads and debates and stories, can't make up their minds.1

Well, it's too early to have a favorite, at least not for any rational person, but let's look at those "unsure" party nomination numbers just for fun.

On the Democratic side, the "unsure" vote was at 13% in March and has steadily dropped to 7% in September (CBS/NYT poll). On the Republican side, "unsure" was at 10% in June, jumped up to 18% in August, but by September settled back to 10%. There is a lot more churn on the GOP side, what with Fred Thompson (from my hometown of L'burg, Tenn.!!!) entering the race, the troubles with Bush's own numbers, and the war.

1 As a methodological aside, we often use the inability to generate an attitude about a political actor as a negative in computing political knowledge. You'll especially find this in anlysis of ANES data. No opinion counts a "0" and some opinion as a "1" in creating an index of knowledge (along with other, more obvious, items like who is chief justice of the supreme court or which party controls congress).

Memory and Mismemory

Okay, as I move into my, um, later years, this story hits a little too close to home.

The Washington Post reported on how when the CDC gave a list of truths and myths about flu, older people who read the flier -- in just 30 minutes! -- misremembered 28 percent of the false statements as true.

In other words, it took only a half hour to get a quarter of the stuff wrong. Myth becomes truth! And in three days, 40 percent made the dramatic change from myth to fact.

Scary.

Now I am starting to remember back to all those myths I learned when I was a kid in school and, even worse, I wonder if I am misremembering some stuff as being fact. Did Mary Beth Lumpkins mean it when she said she liked me in the fifth grade? Or am I misremembering that so that myth became fact. Beth, if you're out there, lemme know. I'm really confused.

Anyway, back to the question at hand -- what people know. Or maybe I should call this blog, what people think they know.

Younger people didn't ace this test either (yes, you hear me sighing in relief). They did better early on, but within three days young people did as poorly as older folk. So what's all this mean? "This phenomenon may help explain why large numbers of Americans incorrectly think that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in planning the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and that most of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi," says the article. "Similarly, many in the Arab world are convinced that the destruction of the World Trade Center on Sept. 11 was not the work of Arab terrorists but was a controlled demolition; that 4,000 Jews working there had been warned to stay home that day; and that the Pentagon was struck by a missile rather than a plane."

In other words, myth becomes reality.

What do people know? Whatever their minds create as fact, apparently. I'd love to know if certain kinds of people are more likely to do this than others. Perhaps some other time I'll explore possible personality or individual differences.

The media role? Reminding people what is fact, what is myth, and why it matters that people keep the differences straight in their heads.

Beth? Fact or myth?

What Kids Know

Good piece in Higher Ed on teaching kids to be good citizens. Check it out.

Unfair Attacks about Dumb Americans

Americans Ignorant and Illiterate

That's the headline for this piece published at something called Outsidethebeltway.com. Quoting another study (more on that later), the author notes

Global political knowledge was miniscule, with just three percent of women
and 14 percent of men saying they are extremely knowledgeable on world politics.

There is a huge difference between what people really know and what they say they know. To be fair, people tend to overestimate their public affairs knowledge, so you might be inclined to buy into the idea that most Americans are morons when it comes to world affairs. I'm not buying it. Hell, I'm a PhDweeb, a news junkie, and I would not call myself "extremely knowledgeable" about world politics.

Later the short piece jumps to reading of books, which may or may not be associated with what you know about world affairs, politics, or anything else other than whether Snape was truly bad and whether Harry dies or not.

The original story comes from something called breitbart.com, essentially writing about a Harris Poll. Okay, now we're backtracking to the original source. More to the point, this is an interactive poll conducted online, not via the traditional random sample procedure. That doesn't mean it's crap, it just means you have to look at it a little more closely and make judgments based on methodology.

The reason for this lack of knowledge? Lack of interest. No surprise there. Indeed, I would be keenly worried about any person who is disinterested in a topic but considers themselves "extremely knowledgeable." That's one scary person.

Question Order Effects

The order you ask questions can influence how people answer survey questions. That's why you often see the general all-purpose "how would you evaluate the president's job" first, not after a long series of questions that ask about all the stuff that is wrong with the country.

Order matters.

One of my earliest academic efforts was a question-order paper. Hell, it even won first place in the theory and methodology division at AEJMC (must have been a weak year because I didn't even mention agenda setting, and I don't think T&M allows a paper that doesn't mention agenda setting. It's a law).

So how about political knowledge? Well, according to one study, asking difficult political knowledge questions early in a survey will dampen how much respondents say they pay attention to the media and are interested in politics. That's kinda interesting. Maybe they get these tough questions and become more self aware of their actual knowledge or interest or media use, or perhaps it artificially dampens their true sense of how much they care and keep up with public affairs. Give people a "buffer" item that allows them to think it's okay to not know so much and the effect is less.

The upshot is such questions, like sensitive items people hate to answer, should go later in the survey. We often preface questions today to make it okay for people to say they don't vote (always inflated) and now you will see respondents told that some people don't keep up with the news, then they are asked "how about you?" This makes good sense. We want accurate measures, not socially desirable ones.

The Role of Parents

A new study suggests parents play a pivotal role in what kids know. While that's kinda obvious, it is important nonetheless to establish this through systematic research and not gut feeling.

What boosts political knowledge for kids? Here are a few:

• Participation in youth activities
• Discussing politics with parents
• Grades in school (higher grades = more knowledge)
• Education level of parents
• Civics courses (this makes such good sense)
• Being a boy versus a girl (see an earlier blog on sex differences)
• Internal political efficacy (basically, the feeling you are capable of keeping up with politics)

I drew these from the multiple regression table in the study in which various factors statistically control for one another. Most make perfectly good sense. Smart parents who talk about politics, that's likely to rub off on kids, especially if they're also smart. Civics classes ... a word, please. My kids have had disappointing civics classes, an N of 2, but I think they are vital and yet the No Child Left Untested has hurt such classes in an attempt to boost math and other scores. That's too bad, but you can hardly blame schools for attacking a class this way.

The ultimate finding here? Parents matter. Talk about politics in front of your kids. Answer their questions. Explain the basics so they understand the context of your discussion. Engage them.

It also helps if parents know what the hell they're talking about. Read the news!