Great Quotes

Yeah, this blog is What People Know. So what are some great lines that use our favorite blog-name phrase? My favorite so far:

The Almighty is not served by the accuracy of what people know, but by the exaltation of what they feel. Appleton's Journal, 1873.

Kinda neat. Gets at the tension between the secular and the religious, between knowledge and affect, and honestly from a religious perspective gets at the crux of an age-old argument between a religious transformation that is emotional (sudden) versus one that is more intellectual (over time). That's about as far as I want to swerve into that debate, though it's an old argument that I've always found fascinating, so much so that I even did some research on it once to examine political attitude differences between those with a sudden versus a longer born-again experience.

Swine Flu, ala H1N1

When a health crisis breaks, you can always count on the American public to be in the know. And a lot of other people around the world too.

Remember HIV/AIDS when it broke in the 1980s? All the misinformation?

Now I give you the swine flu. Oops, not swine flu. H1N1. As one story explains, the Obama folks want to make sure we call it by its scientific name. Not everyone is on board, and the power of a name apparently brings out the crazies around the world. Thus:

As has been noted by others, China, Kazakhstan, the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates have all banned meat and pork products from some parts of the US, according to the office of US Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

The World Health Organization reiterated that one cannot contract the virus by eating pork, and pointed out that no pig had been found yet with this particular virus.

So let's call it H1N1 -- scientifically correct and trippingly tongue-twisting and no where near as much fun to pun with. As the U.S. ag secretary said:

"This really isn't swine flu. It's H1N1 virus," Vilsack said. "We want to say to consumers here and abroad that there is no risk to you, there is no scientific evidence whatsoever that there is any link between consuming pork, prepared pork products, and the H1N1 virus."

Can't wait for the first surveys that ask people what they know about the illness. I did see some interesting interviews in Mexico of regular people who said it came from Canada or the U.S. Never mind we've probably identified the earliest known victim of the disease, a 5-year old kid named Edgar who lives in a Mexican village.

The kooks will be out soon on this one. Tune into your favorite talk radio host for more misinformation.

Compulsory Voting and Political Knowledge

If we forced everyone to vote, made it compulsory, would that improve what people know and how engaged they are in the political process?

One study attempted to answer that question.

The authors found, to little surprise, that making voting compulsory will increase turnout. But as to political knowledge -- nope. No real effect.

The idea seems simple enough. If you have to vote, won't you pay attention more? Won't you at least learn a little bit more than usual when you have to pull a lever or push a button or whatever the hell it is you have to do, depending on your place of voting? Unfortunately this Canadian experiment finds no significant effect, and I see no reason why the results would not also extend to the U.S. or anywhere else.

Awful Events in Athens

The tragedy in Athens this weekend in which a UGA professor shot to death his wife and two other people shows just how much people turn to the news media when it matters. The local newspaper's web site was nearly impossible to reach because of all the traffic. People were picking up bits and pieces of news in any way they could: Internet, friends, smart phones, UGA's own emergency call system.

And on this major news day, the AJC -- my local metro paper -- ironically no longer delivered to Athens.

The shootings happened on Saturday and on Sunday the AJC was no longer being delivered to driveways across Clarke County, a huge void in finding out new information. Yes, you could go to the Net, but not everyone uses the Net. Ironic indeed that the day the AJC chose to stop delivery was on such a major news event.

A lot of the Grady family were either at the shooting, near the shooting when it happened, or know the people involved (Athens is not that big a town). Very sad this weekend, no doubt this week, and for a long time to come, especially for the kids who lost their mother and essentially lost their father as he continues to evade capture.

From a media perspective, this proves the vital nature of journalists, something people tend to forget until it really matters (not unlike cops, firefighters, and all the rest). It sucks that it takes an event like this to remind us that we need these people out there keeping an eye on the world and telling us what's happening.

For a compelling take from a personal and journalistic level, read colleague Michael Castengera's blog.

Does Media Exposure Mean Anything Today?

A couple of days ago I blogged about a new POQ study that found people overestimate in surveys how much they consume news media (in this instance, TV news). Young people in particular were found to significantly overestimate their use of TV news.

So what?

From a data analysis standpoint this causes all kinds of problems. Imagine you're studying how media exposure is related to political knowledge. Now imagine you're particularly interested in how young people use the news media to keep up with politics and public affairs. For young people, though, you find no significant relationship between their media consumption and what they know.

If indeed young people overestimate their media use, the typical relationship between news exposure and political knowledge, for them, may well disappear when actually it exists. In other words, their overestimation of news media suggests there ought to be a stronger relationship than actually exists because, well, they said they use the news media more than they really do. A usual positive association between news media exposure and political knowledge, for young people, may well turn negative. And that's bad news.

Can we correct for this statistically? I don't think so. Can we preface our news exposure questions to make it okay for people to admit they don't consume as much news as they might want to answer to make themselves sound better? Yup. Can we go to some measure other than mere exposure? Attention helps some, but it also rides on top of exposure and that may create similar problems.

Is time spent with the media even meaningful? In our ADD culture, skimming and grazing and getting bits and pieces of news from here and there, I'm not sure time spent with the media even works today. ANES tried some experimental media exposure items in the 2008 pre- and post-election surveys, but I'm saving that for another post on another day, but my overall sense is they're no better than the original ones. I'll do actual analysis of the two and report back.

One Word

What's the one word you'd use to describe Barack Obama?

The fine folks at Pew asked just this. Indeed, they give you three data points of this question (Sept. '08, February '09, and April '09). It makes for a fascinating peek into the public mind, this report. Scroll down a bit and you'll find find a table for "Obama in a Word."

The top word in September '08? Inexperienced. After that came Change, Intelligent, and Young. Of the 19 words generated, four are obviously negatives, the rest positives (Liberal could go either way, I suppose). In very last place: Socialist. We'll return to that in a moment.

By February '09 the top words are Intelligent, Change, and Honest. Only two are negatives, BUT Socialist has moved up the charts with a bullet, into a tie for #13!

In April '09 the top three are: Intelligent, Good, and Socialist. Interestingly, Liberal has moved into #4 in April after being near the bottom in February. Fascinating. Arrogant makes its first appearance in April, but the overall negatives are not so much changed.

What do I make of all this, especially given Obama's overall good favorability ratings? Clearly Limbaugh and Hannity and the other TV/radio commentators are having an impact on the public mind, cementing for at least some people out there what people know about Obama. These guys hammer the term Socialist again and again (never mind that real European style socialists look at this and kinda laugh, or consider misuse of copyright). Clearly it's working, at least for some folks. I'd have to download the data and dig much deeper to understand what kind of folks are using which labels -- and I might do just that this summer just for the hell of it.

It also suggests the partisan hammering may also be creating an early divide in the public mind about Obama, separating us yet again in the tired Red State/Blue State, you're-for-us-or-you're-against-us, thing. Limbaugh more or less said this the other day, that it's "us or them."

If you want to get theoretical on this and really understand the consequences of labeling, I recommend reading the literature on priming and chronically accessible constructs, found largely in the work on social and political cognition. I might touch on it this weekend if I have time and take Socialist to its likely consequences. I love getting all PhDweeb on this stuff.

The Inflated News Audience

Interesting article in the just-off-the-press Public Opinion Quarterly by Markus Prior in which he finds significant overreporting of news exposure by the public. Yes, there's a duh moment here since we know people overestimate how often they vote, how often they attend religious services, and how good their gas mileage is (correlates with gas prices, the higher the gas prices, the better they lie about their mileage). They always overestimate their viewing of "highbrow" content too, like PBS, as compared to actual viewing of stuff like reruns of Gilligan's Island or Sponge Bob.

So the notion that people overestimate their news exposure, no real surprise. The degree of that overestimation, that's a surprise -- at least to me. Prior reports a range of a factor of three to a factor of eight, depending on demographics, on overreporting of news exposure. He also fusses about some survey wording that mass comm types have been bitching about for decades, especially those of us with a history in the actual news business, but that's beside the point here.

Who overreports the most? Young people. By far -- if you buy into his comparison of Nielsen people meters and data from the National Annenberg Election Survey. There's a bit of apples and oranges here, but not enough to challenge his basic finding that people overestimate their consumption of news on television. Families with kids and households with higher incomes, they also overestimate as compared to all viewers.

If you buy into this analysis it raises an interesting methodological question: should we correct statistically for estimates of news exposure? Should be reduce to some degree the news exposure estimates of younger versus older respondents? Prior suggests scholars "would do well to assess media effects with research designs that do not rely on self-reported exposure at all." Damned unlikely, especially if you rely on secondary analysis of archival data, and I'm not sure exactly how to get at this unless we preface our media exposure items in much the same way we do political knowledge questions in which we tell respondents it's okay, really it's okay, if you don't know this (or watch or read the news). Someone needs to test that approach and see if it really does deflate the overinflated numbers.

Study Specs
Markus Prior, "The immensely inflated news audience: Assessing bias in self-reported news exposure," Public Opinion Quarterly 73 (Spring 2009), 130-143.