Abstract #300247

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JSM 2003 Abstract #300247
Activity Number: 321
Type: Topic Contributed
Date/Time: Wednesday, August 6, 2003 : 8:30 AM to 10:20 AM
Sponsor: Social Statistics Section
Abstract - #300247
Title: Measuring Visual Political Knowledge in Web-Based Surveys
Author(s): Markus Prior*+
Companies: Princeton University
Address: Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, NJ, 08544-1013,
Keywords: visual ; verbal ; political knowledge ; survey design ; television ; print media
Abstract:

People get political information from visual media, yet we know little about the impact of images on political knowledge. In a set of experiments embedded in a general population survey, I examine the effect of adding visual elements to verbal knowledge questions. Then, I compare respondents' performance on two scales of political knowledge, a scale that measures visual recognition of politicians, and a traditional verbal knowledge scale. Data for this paper comes from a web-based survey of 2,358 randomly selected U.S. residents. Using a web-based survey design allows me to add photos of politicians to knowledge questions. I find that minimal visual cues can increase people's performance on verbal knowledge tests. Second, the analysis reveals differences between the sources of verbal and visual political knowledge. People who prefer visual news media have greater visual political knowledge. Verbal knowledge, however, increases with political interest regardless of medium preference. Using only verbal knowledge measures thus hides a major contribution of TV news to increasing political knowledge and disadvantages people who get a lot of their political information from television.

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