PR Folks and Coffee

According to this report, PR/marketing folks are the second most caffeinated profession.

Here's the full list:

1. Scientist/Lab Technician
2. Marketing/Public Relations Professional
3. Education Administrator
4. Editor/Writer
5. Healthcare Administrator
6. Physician
7. Food Preparer
8. Professor
9. Social Worker
10. Financial Professional
11. Personal Caretaker
12. Human Resources Benefits Coordinator
13. Nurse
14. Government Professional
15. Skilled Tradesperson (plumber, carpenter, etc)

I have my doubts.

First off, there's no real methodology reported except that it was based on a survey produced by Dunkin' Donuts and something called Careerbuilder. I'm guessing an online survey.  I'm guessing non-random sample.  I'm guessing a site that tends to be visited most often by, coincidentally, people in the jobs listed above.  We do get this bit of methodological notation:

Through this year’s survey of 4,700 U.S. workers, Dunkin’ Donuts and CareerBuilder® learned that scientists/lab technicians need coffee the most to keep their workday running. 

That's a helluva sample, 4,700 U.S. workers, but I'd love to know how they did it.  Telephone?  Or a SLOP (self-selected opinion poll)?  Passenger pigeon?

Finally, cops. They're not even on the list.  Nor firefighters.  Maybe they fall in the "government professional" category, but I'd doubt that even more given it could also mean other governmental types.

And, obviously, I'm upset that "professor" finishes only #8.  My colleagues need to step it up.

I can see PR/marketing folks finishing high on the list.  I'd drink coffee -- laced with arsenic -- if I had to spend my day spinning.  And lab technicians, it can get awfully dull in the lab if you're running the same set of experiments or assignments again and again.  But I would have expected nurses to finish higher.  Ah well, we can always quibble, but it's hard to do so when you don't have enough information to judge the quality of the survey itself.

NYT: Kinda Wrong

There's a story today in the New York Times that offers the following hed: 

Students’ Knowledge of Civil Rights History Has Deteriorated, Study Finds

Scary stuff.  If it were true.

The study by the Southern Poverty Law Center does not examine student knowledge.  Instead, it scores the states, on an A-to-F scale, on how well they incorporate "a body of knowledge that reflects what civil rights historians and educators consider core information about the civil rights movement."

That's not a measure of what students know.  That's a measure of what states teach.  While they're not mutually exclusive, nor are they the same thing.

And yet here's the NYT lede:

That ignorance by American students of the basic history of the civil rights movement has not changed — in fact, it has worsened, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose board Mr. Bond sits. The report says that states’ academic standards for public schools are one major cause of the problem. 

Unless I'm missing a section of the report, it does not directly address changes in what students know about the civil rights movement.  The NYTimes article does note that scores on general history are pretty dismal in the U.S. and seem to be going down even more than other scores, such as math, but you cannot necessarily argue what we see above, that specific knowledge about civil rights has "deteriorated."

This may seem a petty difference, but I disagree.  A state's stated "core" is often different than what teachers discuss in the classroom, so you have to ask about the validity of the measure here.  But it's completely different to talk about what's in a core curriculum and what students actually know.  Are the two correlated?  No doubt.  Are they conceptually the same thing?  Absolutely not.  And for accuracy's sake, the NYT and SPLC should try harder.  The SPLC got it right in their conclusions, when they wrote: "As this report illustrates, states are failing to set high expectations for student knowledge about the civil rights movement."

For the graphically inclined, below is a map of how well state's did.  My state, Georgia, got a "B," one of the few times we outscored others.  You can also find the map here.

 

 

 

Local Matters Again?

Buried deep in a new Pew poll's methodology section is a question about how often folks follow local news and compares 2011 results with previous years.  Respondents were asked if they follow local news closely only when something important is happening or whether they follow it closely whether or not something important is happening.

The results are surprising and, to some, comforting.  My message?  Don't get comfortable quite yet.

According to the survey methods section, from 2002 to 2008, the percent of people who followed local news whether or not something important was happening hovered around 56 or 57 percent of U.S. respondents.  In the current 2011 survey, 72 percent said they followed local news whether or not something important was happening.

Wow.  That's a helluva jump.

I did a 2010 study in Newspaper Research Journal that used some of the same data but examined changes from 1998 to 2008.  My results are somewhat different, odd since I used Pew data, but this may be a function of my analysis strategy. Let's assume my data are somewhat different.  If so, the jump in the interest in local news demonstrated by the Pew report is stunning and, to me, while welcome -- also inexplicable.  Without access to the raw data for comparison purposes, let's look instead at changes in some of the other questions over time to see if we can find an explanation.

•  The report includes a jump in "national" news interest (mid-50s most of the time to 68 percent in the latest report), which supports a change in local as well.

• But, "international" interest doesn't follow the same trend.  This one jumps around a lot, probably due to current events in that given year.  Let's put it aside.

• Here's my major methodological issue.  In previous Pew surveys, the "local" question comes late in the instrument after many questions about specific media use.  In the 2011 version, the "local" question comes quite early -- the sixth question asked.  In 2008, as a comparison, it's the 77th question asked.  It's possible these items were rotated in some random way, but if so I don't see it discussed.  It's likely respondents were primed differently when "local" news is asked after a long list of potential media consumption habits.  If I'm right, the jump is questionable, making comparisons across time problematic.

So we can't get to excited about the jump in local news interest, at least not until we find out whether it may be a methodological fluke rather than evidence of a sudden burning desire in the American public for local news.

Local News

Being a journalism guy I've always had an interest in local news.  In fact, one of my recent Newspaper Research Journal articles looked at the audience for local news over the past 10 years.  Now comes a new Pew study that digs even deeper.

My own stuff found newspapers had a core print audience of people interested in local and community news, particularly local government news.  Whether that audience is big enough to sustain a newspaper/online enterprise is a different matter, but this new Pew report suggests the interest in local has increased and newspapers play a key role, though people today use a mix of media to keep up with various kinds of local news.  The chart below says it all, at least in where people go for specific local news.

But buried deep in the report is a suggestion of growing interest in local news.  And, if you'll excuse the word play, is good news.

Bad Polling

As readers know, I'm a constant critic of bad polling.  Here's an excellent post that takes to task Maine's news media's reporting of just such a suspicious poll.

Who Do You Believe?

There's a big report out today that examines high school students and their teachers. 

The main topic is First Amendment attitudes, but it also includes interesting data about Internet use, including a question about trust of media sources.  Asked if certain sources are "very truthful," high school students replied:

• Newspapers: 31 percent
• Television: 17 percent.
• Internet: 9 percent
• Social Network: 7 percent

Wow.  Teachers gave similar results.  See the report (pdf) and the table for Section 10. 

What's fascinating is how much higher students scored newspapers as "very truthful" (31 percent) than did teachers (14 percent).  The downside of this, of course, is students rarely read a newspaper.  Perhaps if they did, they'd score it lower.  We can't answer that from the data here, but they are hopeful from a print news perspective, which of course is the form of media most closely associated with learning about politics and public affairs.

HPV Knowledge

The HPV vaccine has been in the news of late, so it seems useful to look at a little research on the topic that kinda sorta fits my blog's topic.  In this case, research on what people know or think they know, and their attitudes toward, the vaccine.

• Here's a study, abstract only, that examines the attitudes of gay and heterosexual men.  They found gay men more accepting of the vaccine.

• Another study finds moral beliefs play a big role among Asians in considering the vaccine.

• Even in the U.S., among black college students, men are significantly less likely to have heard about the vaccine.  Similar study here.

• Indeed, studying college students on the topic appears to be a cottage industry.  Here's one study that gets at knowledge.