8) SIGNIFICANCE TO FUTURE RESEARCH ON THIS ISSUE

One interesting consideration from this is measuring citizens' political knowledge. If personality affects knowledge (or at least how we measure it; Mondak indicates generally that an individual's personality has nearly as much to do with non-knowledge elements as their actual knowledge level. Although Mondak addresses specifically the inclusion of DKs (and the question wording seemed different than that used in the DV of this analysis) an interesting analysis would be an attempt to separate "environmental" effects, "actual knowledge" and "personality" affects. Additionally, this analysis seems to imply that an individual's "knowledge" is not in fact knowledge at all, but is instead a product of their "perception of knowledge" based on whatever environment they're exposed to. If variations in knowledge questions reflect not only 'real knowledge' but also personality-based indicators (whether a respondent is shy or a risk-taker) is it also possible that 'knowledge' is generated by the environment regardless of whether that knowledge is factual or not? And if so, how do you separate real "factual knowledge" from perceived knowledge that citizens seem to be assuming is factual? Or perhaps its not important to know whether a citizen's level of knowledge is based on something 'real' or 'experienced', but only what they know or think they know about a political issue.
--JERIT & BARABAS 2003; ME

Polls provide important information for presidents about the salience of issues and the publics position on these issues (151).  This may have good and bad implications: with presidents more likely to follow public opinion, democratic advancements may be the potential outcome, or, presidents will focus on issues low in salience to the general public but high in salience to smaller interest groups able to fund electoral efforts (152).[FN]   The key concept, however, is that information impacts decision-making - those maximizing public support through this knowledge will have a distinct advantage over candidates/presidents who do not.  In addition, "well-informed presidents will be better able to practice leadership, but they also will have more opportunities to use issues to advance their standing with interest groups and/or financial contributors" (155-156).
[FN: "[T]he information from polls predicts in the aggregate an increase in polarization of American politics, where presidents now more of the public's thinking can use some small issues to pay off key groups of supporters" (152).]
--GEER & GOORHA 2003

"By observing aggregates only, the representative will fail to appreciate what is driving constituent opinion and how those attitudes might be changed for the collective good" (p.193).  This assumes representatives are equally as interested in changing policy opinion as they are in interpreting it ("whenever legislators are asked to choose between two alternative policies they first ask which alternative would contribute more to their chances for reelection" (Arnold, 1990: 60).  Would elites frame an issue based on a desire to 'change' opinion or instead want to find the "right frame" that will win them the most future votes?
--ALVAREZ & BREHM 2002

This multicoliniarity issue is actually of particular interest. If much of the media effects are being 'absorbed' and transferred to opinion or vote change though other variables, instead of creating complex power models, shouldn't we be spending time trying to acertain the nature and extent of these absorbed effects? Granted, this is a complex situation; who is to say what variables are affected (if any for some) and whether all individuals absorb, transmit or otherwise receive these effects in the same way. However, it seems to me that to just assume that this is a "necessary but realistic fact" and not assume that we could somehow figure out a way in which to separate and/or capture absorbed effects seems to me hubristic. Unfortunately, I don't have any "off the cuff" ideas, whether remote or significant, that might even begin to address this issue, so it is left for future pontification, but the point remains; do we really want to assume that there is only one path to "verifiable significance" when it comes to determining media effects?
--ZALLER 2002

"There are several important conclusions that emerge if the cognitive response framework is taken seriously. The most obvious implication is that survey questions are inherently noisy measures...'Better questions' will never eliminate this variability" (266).
--FELDMAN 1995

"The concept of public opinion is part and parcel of democratic theory, created in response to problems of collective judgment and decision making. The social-philosophical and empirical literatures alike indicate an overriding concern with the 'goodness' of democratic judgment, its 'proper' reflection of public opinion, and the 'soundness' of that opinion" (339).
--PRICE & NEIJENS 1998

There are ways of manipulating survey questionnaires that increase the likelihood of more accurate responses.  If recall of the specific number of events is important, questions should direct the response of a shorter/closer time period than if information is more biographical.  Bounded recall -- individuals are better able to recall accurate information from past events if they are pormpted or 'cued' by significant events in the past. The significance is important in that question wording which best responds to these political cues can be enhanced by keeping these issues in mind.
--TOURANGEAU, RIPS & RASINSKI 2000

Achen indicates that attitudes are stable, but survey items are unable to tap these attitudes. He suggests that measurement error should lead to reduced correlations between separate assessments that do not vary with the inter-assessment interval, whereas instability in the attitudes themselves should result in correlations that decrease with increasing inter-assessment intervals
--LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003

"as expertise increases the efficiency of both conscious and nonconscious judgment processes, people have the capacity to make judgments that are more or less affectively-based depending on the extent to which conscious or nonconscious mechanisms are called upon during the judgment process. Survey methods and item content that systematically manipulate the judgment mechanisms relied upon could therefore come to very different conclusions about the impact of political sophistication on political judgments".
----here's where my idea comes into play --- by creating a psdo-environment in which respondents are temporarily at the same "sophistication level" and conscious as well as unconscious thinking level, we can assess more accurate levels of attitudinal responses to survey questions
--LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003

"the extent to which lateral versus medial temporal cortex is active during political attitude assessments may reveal the extent to which individuals retrieve personal experiences or learned facts and this can be done without ever asking the participants to list thoughts relevant tot heir attitude, a procedure that is contaminated by having just provided the attitude measure itself (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977).
----however, through processes of neurolinguistics, we can address an issue, word a survey question, or activate thoughts relevant to various issues from respondents without creating this bias#. We do this by providing response sets that do not particularly relate to the issue at hand (similar to Kings vignettes) however, in reality it IS assessing a certain attitude, bias or approach.
--LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003

"traditional research methods in this domain, which typically rely on self-report surveys, might not be able to provide a full explanation of political attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making"
---this is where I can do review of the conflicting results obtained from self-reported survey efforts
--LIEBERMAN, SCHREIBER, & OCHSNER 2003

The authors argue that it may be conceivable that simple exposure to news media-even if it does not result in a lasting store of retrievable information-is sufficient to produce various attitudinal effects that interest communication researchers. This might be true, but it seems we would also want to know what the differences are, in terms of one person's reception versus another. The authors seem to just relate it to previous political knowledge, but I would argue instead the people just "learn" in different ways. Not only that, but what they learn from different environments may be different as a result. For instance, some people are much more visual learners, or audio learners, while others learn better through reading. These differences in fact may account for why the authors found no variation in recall among media types (assuming that visual/kinesthetic/audio learners are near-equally distributed). Also though, these variations in learning style could mean that the information obtained from each media-type differs. This could be accounted for/tested, with variations in survey questions asked (for the different types of information that could be obtained) and controls for each of the media types.
--ME

"The concept of public opinion is part and parcel of democratic theory, created in response to problems of collective judgment and decision making. The social-philosophical and empirical literatures alike indicate an overriding concern with the 'goodness' of democratic judgment, its 'proper' reflection of public opinion, and the 'soundness' of that opinion" (339).
--PRICE & NEIJENS 1998