Political knowledge is a valuable resource for citizens in democracies. People with higher levels of knowledge participate more often in the political process. They also are more tolerant and more likely to hold opinions that are consistent with their interests. But if political knowledge is so important, how do individuals learn about politics? There is good reason to suspect that the mass media inform citizens, yet the scholarly evidence points in different directions. That is because many research designs fail to rule out common inferential threats, and the majority of studies purporting to examine media effects do not include measures of actual media content.
Unlike the typical experiment, which compares different groups of people, this project compares the same person's responses to survey questions under conditions of high and low media coverage. The project compiles and analyzes data from hundreds of nationally representative cross-sectional surveys that ask respondents multiple questions about a single political event (for example, a battery of questions about a bill pending in Congress or several items about a government report on Social Security) and from coding the content of news stories. The surveys have multiple observations for the same respondent at a single moment in time. Importantly, the coverage devoted to different aspects of the same news event also varies. Regardless of factors, like income or education, that explain variation in knowledge across individuals, any given individual differences in knowledge can be attributed to changes in the amount of media coverage. These "within-survey/within-subjects" comparisons hold constant all individual-level characteristics. Hypotheses concerning the effect of media coverage upon political knowledge can be tested by comparing media coverage of various aspects of these events to people's information of these events.
Scholars are becoming interested in how individual-level characteristics interact with features of the media environment, so the demand for data sources that include information about individuals as well as their media environments will only increase in the years to come. This proposal resurrects hundreds of cross-sectional opinion surveys and pairs them with original media content data. This proposal anticipates that this resource will be of interest to scholars in a variety of fields (e.g., political science, communications, sociology, journalism, and economics). The final product will be disseminated in easy-to-use CD-ROMs so that teachers can use the data in undergraduate and graduate level classes (e.g., for assignments, papers, and class presentations).
Political knowledge influences a wide array of political behaviors, from the most elemental activities (e.g., information processing, opinion formation) to what some might consider the most consequential (e.g., support for democratic values, participation). However, most of what we know about this vital political resource is based on studies that examine the individual-level correlates of knowledge—factors that change little if at all over a person’s lifetime (e.g., education, gender, race). Our project examines how specific aspects of news coverage (such as the level of expert commentary or a story’s location in a broadcast) affect political knowledge. We also showcase a new approach for increasing the value of existing survey data. In collaboration with the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, we assembled hundreds of surveys that permit within-survey/within-subjects (ws/ws) comparisons. From a scientific standpoint, these questions are useful because they ask the same respondent multiple questions about the same issue or topic (all within a single survey). When combined with information about the media’s coverage of these topics, researchers have a powerful approach for estimating the size and direction of media effects. In addition to the study of political knowledge, the larger collection of questions can be used to examine other aspects of public opinion, such as economic perceptions, presidential approval, and policy preferences.
