More Coding Fun

I blogged here, and a day later here, about the 2008 ANES open-ended answers and the difficulties of coding them when it comes to political knowledge. I used Nancy Pelosi as an example and asked whether it's correct or incorrect to call her merely a "member of the House" as opposed to the more specific "Speaker of the House."

Today, a few of the other questions asked of respondents. Asked who was Dick Cheney, a zillion people got it right. Vice president. Favorite answer: "vp he's a jerk. don't give him a gun." I'd count that as correct, I suppose, just because of the "vp" part.

Asked "who is Gordon Brown" (The PM of UK), however, people flaked out. Favorite answers below in quote marks, my snotty comments in italics:

• "Who is Gordon Brown?" I suppose if you don't know the answer, repeat the question.
• "works in the white house? james brown relative?" I feel goood!
  
• "small business administration." Not sure where the hell that comes from.
• "FEMA" You're doing a heckuva job, Brownie. Er, wrong Brownie.
• "Governmental. Is he even a person?" Yeah, kinda, though Tories might disagree.

This item generally gets the lowest number of correct responses. Later today, or perhaps tomorrow, I'll look at the questions on John Roberts, chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Names

So I'm working on a piece of research with a simple underlying thesis -- names matter. This gets into how we structure knowledge, but the basic idea is that asking someone a political knowledge question that starts with the name (as in, who is Dick Cheney?) is easier to answer than one that starts with the office (who is the vice president?).

Simple, eh?

Peek under the hood, into the engine of the brain, and this has some interesting twists and turns and cables and hoses, but what I'm working on is a media connection, that people who rely on entertainment-based news or even TV news will be more successful at questions in which they are given the name versus questions in which they are prompted instead with the office. People who rely in print news, a more active process, should be better able to handle both kinds of questions. Again, this gets into how each form of news is remembered and how this in turn influences memory structure.

Okay, so what did I find? Some support, at least in my initial data analysis. I've got a lot of fine tuning to do, numbers to crunch, data to manipulate, and I've got to think through some complicated interaction effects. But I think I'm on to something.

There is little practical use for this beyond understanding how people structure political information in their heads, except that the kinds of knowledge questions you ask in a survey can strongly influence who is likely, or unlikely, to answer them. As people become more and more reliant on skimming the news, catching it on The Daily Show, or a few minutes of CNN they will become less able to answer the "hard" questions.

In some ways this resembles the results I found in my Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media piece a year or so ago, in which I found some support for the idea that watching comedy news programs was more associated with recognition of political information than with actual recall of political facts.

Name Recognition Research

I'm just getting into this, the research on name recogntion. Why? I'm kinda curious as to whether it matters how you ask the following:

• Prompt with a name, such as Dick Cheney, and ask them what office that person holds.
• Prompt with the office, such as vice president, and ask them to name the person.

I suspect the second is the more difficult. A name carries with it all the cognitive and affective baggage one would expect, including the office or position that person holds. The office? If I ask who is the VP you gotta first access what the position is, maybe get some history messed up in there, the constitutional requirements, and all that crud. It's a busy task and people are cognitive misers, which is PhDweebSpeak for we take mental shortcuts. Take a shortcut and you're more likely to be wrong, or just not answer.

Okay, but why am I writing about this?

I suspect people who rely on television or entertainment media, like Colbert or Stewart, will do okay at the name-and-then-office question option, but they'll do less well at the office-then-name question -- at least compared to people who read the news online or via ink on smushed paper. I am going to test just this in some analyses this week, perhaps for a journal submission or conference paper.

Unfortunately the data always get in the way of a good theory. I'll know in a day or two when I run some quick-and-dirty tests to see if the notion is worth pursuing.