Is It Talking, Thinking, or Both? A Lagged Dependent Variable Model of Discussion Effects on Political Knowledge

Abstract

Recent research has begun to shed light on the nature of the relationship between discussion of politics and political knowledge. Scholars have moved beyond simple measures of the amount of discussion about politics to incorporate more sophisticated conceptions of the aspects of political discussion that may contribute to an informed public. The present study attempts to build on this literature in two ways. First, we bring panel data to bear on the general question of the relationship between political discussion and political knowledge, allowing us to have greater confidence in the direction of the relationship than most prior research. Second, we expand the domain of discussion-related variables to include not only frequency of discussion and thinking about aspects of the discussion (''discussion elaboration'') but also the act of perspective taking that is theoretically central to the notion of deliberative discussion. Our findings suggest that the relationship between discussion and knowledge is in fact likely to be causal in nature. In addition, our findings indicate that, at best, perspective taking does not contribute to political learning. At worst, those who are more likely to engage in perspective taking are likely to learn less about politics. But frequency of discussion and discussion elaboration do appear to be significant causes of political knowledge.

The Structure of Communication Networks Matters: How Network Diversity, Centrality, and Context Influence Political Ambivalence, Participation, and Knowledge

“…They argue that in order to assess the unique contribution of a given measure of discussion, one must first control at least overall frequency. Of course, there also are obvious concerns with including highly correlated measures together in a statistical model because (1) the effects of discussion measures may be empirically indistinguishable from one another (Eveland & Thomson, 2006) and (2) it renders parameter estimates less reliable due to high sample-to-sample variations of standard errors (Shieh & Fouladi, 2003). So, scholars face a dilemma in addressing this concern about independence of effects versus multicollinearity in statistical models.…”

Predicting Attitude Toward Methamphetamine Use: The Role of Antidrug Campaign Exposure and Conversations About Meth in Montana

“…Even though there is recent precedent to test reasoned action models with health-related survey data collected at one point in time (Dillard, 2011;Nabi, Southwell, & Hornik, 2002;Roberto, Krieger, & Katz, 2011), longitudinal data or experimental data would provide a superior assessment of both theory and campaign effectiveness. Researchers must rely on theoretical arguments for assessing relationships among cross-sectional data, and insight into theory can still be gained from such studies (Eveland & Thomson, 2006). The ability of the specified model to fit these data better than a competing model gives some credence to the theoretical relationships reported here.…”

“…on a scale from 0 (very little attention) to 10 (close attention) (M = 5.13, SD = 2.44, α = .81). This scale has been used in numerous studies of media effects (Chaffee & Schleuder, 1986;Eveland & Thomson, 2006).…”

“…Six items used in media effects research (Eveland & Thomson, 2006) assessed the frequency with which people talked about meth with others in the recent past ("In the past 6 months, how often have you talked about methamphetamine with: neighbors, coworkers, friends, acquaintances, family, and classmates"). People indicated the amount of discussion on an ordinal scale from 0 (none in the last 6 months) to 7 (50 times or more) (M = 1.05, SD = 0.93, α = .80).…”

“…Three questions used to assess media effects (Eveland & Thomson, 2006) measured the frequency with which participants encountered MMP advertisements. Items assessed the number of days in the previous week that participants watched an MMP ad on television, read an MMP ad in print (i.e., on a billboard or in a newspaper), or heard an MMP ad on the radio ("How many days in the past week did you watch/read/hear a Montana Meth Project advertisement on the television/on billboards or in newspapers/on the radio?…”