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Roundtable: Media Measures for the ANES
The new media environment is incredibly exciting, but it can also be unnerving for those of us engaged in researching how people engage with the media. For many years, the American National Election Studies (ANES) has been a vital data resource on this topic, especially on issues related to consumption of poltical information, but over the years its survey questions have become dated (most were written in the early 1980s). In a world of mobile phones and the web, many of the questions still pertain to print newspapers and local television news. Moreover, many of the measurements have not kept up with important developments in thinking about how people process information.
As a response to these issues, ANES has commissioned Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury to think through what might be done. Their full report is available here, and their executive summary serves as the commentary for this issue of Political Communication Report, and as the prompt for this roundtable.
I won't summarize Althaus and Tewksbury's views here, except to say that they generally recommend extending measures to include new information technologies, relying on "days per week" rather than "minutes per day" measures, and including measures of decisiveness and closed-mindedness to get at issues of information processing.
Our roundtable participants applaud Althaus and Tewksbury's work and feel that it is overdue. Indeed, they are so excited by the report that most of them devote most of their comments to ways of expanding it. Shapiro suggests looking farther into the future, to think not only in terms of years, or even decades, but also in terms of generations. "The title of the report refers to 'a New Generation of Media Use Measure,'" Shapiro writes, but why not ask about media use measures for new generations?" In a review of how researchers have actually used media measures, Eveland et. al. argue that any new measures "ought to be supplemented with conceptualization and empirical work on the broader construct of news use." And Barabas compares Althaus and Tewksbury's proposed measures to a set he used in a 2007 survey. He finds that the two sets of media exposure measures perform similarly in the area of political knowledge. However, he notes that many questions remain, especially in the areas of what measures are actually measuring and what an ideal of exposure items would look like. Fowler, Goldstein and Shah are a bit more circumspect about Althaus and Tewksbury's proposal. Focusing on the distinction types of programs--especially television programs--they write that "the risks of altering the measurement in the ways [Althaus and Tewksbury] propose may outweigh the advantages for those interested in the differences in the content (both in paid and free media) of local, national, and cable news."
Althaus and Tewksbury have kindly read all of the comments and responded with a detailed reaction here.
Of course, you don't have to accept the views of our esteemed panel. Read the report for yourself and come to your own judgment. ANES has not made its final verdict on the new measures and so there is still time to influence the outcome. Send your comments to Althaus or Tewksbury or to the ANES itself.
I want to thank Althaus and Tewksbury for bringing their work to my attention, and Robert Shapiro, William Eveland and his group, Jason Barabas, and Erika Franklin Fowler, Ken Goldstein and Dhavan Shah for reading the report so closely and offering their thoughts. The ANES survey is so important to work in this area, it is vital to get it right, or at least as right as we can get it in a rapidly changing media environment.
Here are the roundtable contributions:
Jason Barabas, "Measuring Media Exposure in the 2006 ANES Pilot Study and Beyond."
William Eveland, et. al., "Extending Validation Efforts to the Concept of News Use."
Robert Y. Shapiro, “Comment: Media Use Measures for New Generations."
Erika Franklin Fowler, Ken Goldstein, and Dhavan Shah, "The Challenge of Measuring News Consumption."
And here is Althaus and Tewksbury's reaction:
Scott Althaus and David Tewksbury, "Reaction."
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