Media and Politics

Nelson, Thomas E.; Bryner, Sarah McKinnon; Carnahan, Dustin

doi:10.1017/cbo9780511921452.014

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 48 publications

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“…As with the degrees of variation related to experimental subjects, from a substantive point of view there is also an infinite number of experimental designs that we could use to examine sample differences. After considering the full range, we chose to focus on framing studies (Chong and Druckman 2007; Kinder 2003; Nelson et al 2011). Framing is ideal for our purposes for three reasons: it is a prominent line of inquiry in political behavior research, it has long-standing theoretical expectations, and it has frequently been the subject of experimentation (Chong and Druckman 2010).…”

Section: Concerns About Sample Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Sample Comparisons and External Validity

Krupnikov¹,

Levine²

2014

J Exp Polit Sci

224

156

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Experimentation is an increasingly popular method among political scientists. While experiments are highly advantageous for creating internally valid conclusions, they are often criticized for being low on external validity. Critical to questions of external validity are the types of subjects who participate in a given experiment, with scholars typically arguing that samples of adults are more externally valid then student samples. Despite the vociferousness of such arguments, these claims have received little empirical treatment. In this paper we empirically test for key differences between student and adult samples by conducting four parallel experiments on each of the three samples commonly used by political scientists. We find that our student and diverse, national adult sample behave consistently and in line with theoretical predictions once relevant moderators are taken into account. The same is not true for our adult convenience sample.

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Section: Concerns About Sample Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cross-Sample Comparisons and External Validity

Krupnikov¹,

Levine²

2014

J Exp Polit Sci

224

156

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A Source of Bias in Public Opinion Stability

Druckman¹,

Fein²,

Leeper³

2012

Am Polit Sci Rev

177

133

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A long acknowledged but seldom addressed problem with political communication experiments concerns the use of captive participants. Study participants rarely have the opportunity to choose information themselves, instead receiving whatever information the experimenter provides. We relax this assumption in the context of an over-time framing experiment focused on opinions about health care policy. Our results dramatically deviate from extant understandings of over-time communication effects. Allowing individuals to choose information themselves—a common situation on many political issues—leads to the preeminence of early frames and the rejection of later frames. Instead of opinion decay, we find dogmatic adherence to opinions formed in response to the first frame to which participants were exposed (i.e., staunch opinion stability). The effects match those that occur when early frames are repeated multiple times. The results suggest that opinion stability may often reflect biased information seeking. Moreover, the findings have implications for a range of topics including the micro–macro disconnect in studies of public opinion, political polarization, normative evaluations of public opinion, the role of inequality considerations in the debate about health care, and, perhaps most importantly, the design of experimental studies of public opinion.

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Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

Slothuus

2015

Political Communication

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Despite generations of research, political scientists have troubles pin-pointing the influence of political parties on public opinion. Recently, scholars have made headway in exploring whether parties in fact shape policy preferences by relying on experimental designs. Yet, the evidence from this work is mixed. I argue that the typical experiment faces a design problem that likely minimizes the extent to which parties apparently matter. Because parties have policy reputations, experimental participants may already know from real-world exposure to political debate where the parties stand before they are told in the experiment-they are "pre-treated". This study investigates how real-world political context interferes with party cue stimulus in experiments. In two experiments I show that two types of "pretreatment" from outside the experimentexposure-based and reputation-based-dramatically moderate the effects of party cues in experiments. Moreover, the politically aware participants-who are most likely to have been pretreated before entering the experiment-are the most sensitive to this interference from realworld context. Paradoxically, experimenters are most likely to find no effect of parties at the very time that their influence is strongest outside the experiment. These findings emphasize the importance of keeping real-world context in mind when designing and analyzing experiments on political communication effects and might help reconcile disparate results of previous party cue experiments.

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Media and Politics

Cited by 6 publications

References 48 publications

Cross-Sample Comparisons and External Validity

Cross-Sample Comparisons and External Validity

A Source of Bias in Public Opinion Stability

Assessing the Influence of Political Parties on Public Opinion: The Challenge from Pretreatment Effects

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