Measuring Media Exposure

A standard measure in our field is news media exposure -- how much people watch TV news or read a paper, that sort of thing. It's been around since the 1950s, it remains in most Pew surveys, despite research suggesting respondents exaggerate their exposure and the question is full of measurement error.  One guy called news media exposure "one of the most notable embarrassments of modern social science."  Ouch.

And yet, here I am, studying news media exposure because, dammit, I'm a notable embarrassment.

I'm comparing specific sources of TV news (Fox, CNN, ABC, etc.) with the traditional 0-to-7 days a week of generic TV news watching.  Is it better to be specific?  Well, yeah .. except it costs you additional survey questions which anyone in the trade will tell you costs you additional money to pay for that time in the survey.

We obviously gain something by asking about specific news sources.  If nothing else, it's well established now in the literature that folks who watch Fox News come away with a very different version of the world than those who watch other news sources -- more so than those who watch MSNBC.  If you doubt this, see the latest Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly article about "death panels" and sources of news.  Fox News matters.  I'll blog on this article more another day.

Anyway, back to my problem because it's all about me.  I'm comparing how exposure to generic television news is the same or different from exposure to the three broadcast and three cable news networks on five different criterion variables (political knowledge, likelihood to vote, etc.).  To put it in less PhDweeb terms, I want to know whether you get a better result from the generic single question than from the six specific network questions.  Oh, and even better, I've tossed in exposure to specific programs in the three cable news networks (The O'Reilly Factor, etc.).  Fun stuff.

But ... I'm also mulling over a different measure.  Take TV news exposure on a 0-to-7 days scale and combine it with a count of how many different TV networks you say you watch (yes-no question).  It's a weighted measure.  People who watch three networks but not very much (1 day a week) are different than those who watch three networks 7 days a week.  To reverse this, people who report watching TV news 7 days a week but from only one network should in some way be different than those who watch 7 days a week but three different networks.  The math here is tough, how to come up with a valid weighted measure.  Suggestions welcome.  Right now I'm working with a simple interactive term (# of sources x days generic exposure).  I haven't run the analyses yet to see how it fares against the more traditional generic measure of specific network measures, but I'm hoping to see something useful, something helpful for future scholars.

Or at least another pub.  Yes, this is what we academics do when not teaching and other stuff.

Again, methodological suggestions welcome.

MSCNE13

I have all these T-shirts with MSCNE on 'em, followed by a year, and now it's time for a new shirt because MSCNE13 is upon us.

Huh?

It's a mouthful of a name -- Management Seminar for College Newspaper Editors.  Some 60 or so college editors from 28 states arrive today (Sunday) for a week of bonding and frivolity and training and workshops and more frivolity and a desperate need to figure out what the hell they're gonna do when they go back home and find themselves in charge of their college newspapers.

To all of you, welcome and best of luck.

I teach some years but not this one (I'm having vocal cord issues, tied to thyroid issues, tied to cancer issues ... a long and very boring story that involves an ugly scar across my neck that's not the result of some cool dangerous reporting story).  I do hope to sit in on a couple of sessions, including Monday's The State of College Media, the Future of College Media at 1:15 p.m. in MLC, Room 250.  With luck someone is gonna put this session online because it'll be helpful for those who can't make it.  If you're near Athens, I recommend dropping in.

Participants, you'll really enjoy the guest speakers, the hands-on training, and especially the simulated news event later in the week.

It's cool to see someone representing my alma mater, the University of North Alabama, known to many as TUNA, and its paper The Flor-Ala.  I think someone has come before, but I'm not sure.  Some years I've taught MSCNE, some years I've been out of the state or country.

And while I've enjoyed teaching sessions or sitting in on sessions, one thing I don't like is standing in line at the campus Jittery Joe's waiting for coffee.  Important safety tip, visiting editors -- regular customers go to the front of the line.  It's true.  Just as Caleb, the guy who runs the MLC shop.  Hell, he makes my coffee before I order it, I'm such a regular.  

When it comes to coffee, fear me.  Just ask Bentley.

JOBEM: The Political Satire Issue

The latest issue of the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media arrived in my mailbox the other day and there are two articles that focus on political satire -- specifically, faux programs like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

• An article by Dannagel G. Young takes a uses and grats approach to explore why young people are drawn to, or away from, satirical programming.  In mass comm we often dare to research the obvious (I've done it myself) and this one finds those who like such programming watch it for the humor, to learn what's going on, that they see is as unbiased (really?), and it makes the news fun.  When research says it's about "young people" you can read that as code for "I surveyed kids in college classes."  That's the case here, and as many of us know, college students are linked to, but not necessarily the same as, humans.  A big deal here is that young people watch because such programs make news fun.  The journalist in me cringes, but it's clear that the motivations for why people watch are very different than what Stewart and others hope to accomplish in their programs.

• An article by R. Lance Holbert and colleagues looks at perceptions of satire as persuasion.  It's a different take, an experimental approach (yes, yet again the intensive study of that creature, the college student) that finds young voters perceive there to be persuasive intent in satire.  It dips into the differences between horatian and juvenalian forms of humor (I covered this last summer in a grad seminar, very interesting stuff).  The authors find "neither type of satire functions as effective narrative persuasion" from the standpoint of the dominant model in the field -- ELM.

There's also a piece about Twitter I haven't gotten to yet in the journal.  Perhaps more on that another time.

What People Know (or, mostly, don't)

It's time for my occasional knowledge roundup, a look at breaking studies and stories about what people know (or don't know) about stuff. Some of these, well, you'll see ...

• More than a third of Australians don't know how long it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun, says the Science Literacy of Australia report.  A third of respondents thought the Earth took a day to orbit the Sun.  Damn, that's fast.  Plenty of other goodies in this story if you like to make fun of our friends down under (and who doesn't?).  A different version, focusing on young respondents, here.

• Women don't know nuthin about politics. I blogged this one recently (see it for more details than here), but the 10-nation study still has legs as can be seen by a new story focused on Norway, based on the same survey.  Let me point out that this study generated a lot of heat over the pond, and rightly so as it oversimplifies some key differences in how political knowledge surveys are done.
  

• Okay, a weird one, meaning a Brit one. I can't do this justice, so let me just quote the first graph: One in 10 people have tasted “chicken trotters”, while 8% believe they have tried “pigs’ wings”, while others think pigs fly and chickens trot, a survey from the RSPCA has indicated.  Pigs wings. Priceless. Here's a different take on Brits and food knowledge, also kinda funny.  I did not know cheesecake originated in Greece.

• The most likely avenue to attack computer users is through their lack of knowledge about computer security, says this survey of IT professionals.  It's true.  Even among my own colleagues, there are many who are clueless when it comes to safe computing or even how to turn on their printer.  And I work in a j-school.

And that's my roundup of the week.

Measuring Political Knowledge via the ANES

Warning -- this is one my more PhDweeby posts. I'll skip the math, but in this post I will discuss a paper soon to be published in Political Analysis, a journal full of scary math.  It's about the usefulness of questions from the American National Election Studies, the dominant source of data in most political science, in measuring political knowledge.

Before we get to the meat of the thing, there's a nice section on why political knowledge matters, how it "shapes the behavior of citizens in a democracy," and a nice discussion of the different ways we measure the concept.  I may come back to that in a moment.

The authors took data from the 1992, 1996, 2000, and 2004 ANES.  In these data are various measures:

• Correct placement of the candidates and parties ideologically from one another.
• Identification of candidate and party positions on major policies.
• Identification of the positions held by major political actors

The authors took all these questions (there are a lot of them), summed them, divided by the number of items, and came up with a score.  Fairly common procedure.  After cranking the data through analyses to test for invariance, etc., see the graph below.  It's a little long, but worth the time:

Our results help explain why researchers have been frustrated in their attempt to measure and explain apparent knowledge gaps between various grouping variables including participation, media use, educational attainment, income, and age. Models seeking to explain observed differences have been unsuccessful because the construct of political knowledge is apparently qualitatively different between subgroups based on these grouping variables—excluding media use. Attempts to explain these differences will thus be unsuccessful, if political knowledge is measured using the full battery, because the measures are not sufficiently invariant to permit valid comparisons. The inconsistent results may also stem from a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the measurement model underpinning political knowledge. Our results suggest that the use of indexes assumed to be measured without error cannot be supported.

Not the "excluding media use."  That's nice to know for you budding political communication scholars out there and indeed, if you look at especially Figure 3, the media use items (in particular, newspaper use) really pop compared to others.

The authors argue that political knowledge scales must not be "established by fiat," a shot across the academic bow to most of us who use them.

Weiner

Anthony Weiner has apparently sexted again.  A press conference is scheduled soon.

Yeah, so who sexts?

According to this 2010 Pew study, only 6 percent of U.S. adults sent a sexually explicit text to someone else (3 percent forwarded one).  Fifteen percent have received one.  I have not.  Damn.

By age, it looks like below with a high of 10 percent age 25 to 34 admitting saying they sexted.

Unfortunately the numbers are too small to explore what factors predict the likelihood to sext -- other than being a disgraced congressman (and now mayoral candidate) from New York, that is.  As Pew notes:

Men and women are equally likely to send sexts, although male cell owners are a bit more likely than women to say that they have received these types of images on their phones (18% of male cell owners and 12% of female cell owners have done so). Men are also a bit more likely to forward these messages to others compared with women (5% of male cell owners and 2% of female cell owners have forwarded a sext to someone else).

Screwed by an Academic Journal

An interesting survey from Pew just hit online, this about how Latinos get their news (English or Spanish) and their attitudes about this news.

When it comes to the accuracy of news reporting, Hispanics are just as likely to say Spanish-language news organizations and English-language news organizations “get the facts straight” in their news stories and reports.

Why is my title above "screwed by an academic journal?"  Because I did similar research, sent it to the journal years ago, and the editor sat on the study until last week I finally, in frustration, pulled the thing.  Did the editor apologize for fucking up?  No.  Instead, the editor asked if I'd read for the journal.  I did not respond.  More on my frustration here, if you care to read it.

Notice how I nicely did not identify the journal, not even the gender of the editor?  If you care, I'll tell you privately.

I did at least get a conference paper out of the study, and I have fresh data that would really make a new version good -- but I have two other studies in my queue to finish.  Not sure I'll get to it.