Comparing College Students with the Brain Damaged

There was a The Onion headline once that went something like this:

Study Finds
College Students
Linked to Humans

That hed above, that's satire.  Maybe.  But here's a new study that compares college students to people with brain damage, at least in what they know about politics.  The link doesn't tell you a lot other than the title, so lemme start there:

Assessing Voting Competence and Political Knowledge: Comparing Individuals with Traumatic Brain Injuries and “Average” College Students 

How's that for fun?  You're probably asking, what the hell, why study this?  Isn't it obvious that there's no difference?

As a professor and father of a college student, I'm right there with ya.  But let's get to the study itself.  As you can tell from the link above, all we have access to is the title, so I used a different database to scare up an abstract, but not full paper, to get a sense of what's going on here.  

It's not as dumb a study as the title suggests.

First, the authors note that many states bar people with traumatic brain injury (TBI) from voting.  This I did now know.  So the authors found 14 people with TBI and compared them with with 22 "average" college students on, according to them, "measures of voting capacity and election-specific political knowledge." 

Okay, you see the problem right off.  We're comparing 14 people with 22 people.  How do you decide, from an N of 22, who is "average?"  I've got no idea either.  And the tests they used to measure competency and knowledge are new to me.  Let's turn to the abstract itself for some guidance:

We compared their responses to healthy controls (HC) (students at a large public university in North Carolina; n = 22) on voting competency and political knowledge using the Competency Assessment Tool for Voting (designed by Appelbaum, Bonnie, and Karlawish), as well as measures of 2008 election information and questions drawn from the United States Citizen and Immigration Services citizenship exam. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to compare election-specific knowledge of persons with TBI and HCs. We find that those with TB! scored similarly to the healthy controls on competence to vote and election-specific knowledge. We conclude suffrage laws should not be based on overly broad, general assumptions regarding the cognitive capacity of citizens, but on whether or not they express a desire to vote.

So as I said above, there's a good finding here depending on how much quality you place on the voting knowledge and competence of "average" college students in the first place.  The data strongly suggest that states that ban people with severe brain trauma from voting need to rethink these laws.

For me -- and I can't resist -- the idea that "average" college students and people with brain damage score about the same on political knowledge tests, that says a lot about college students themselves.

Bilingual and Brains

There's an old joke:

What do you call someone who speaks three or more languages?  

Multilingual.  

How about two languages?  

Bilingual.  

How about just one language?  

American.

Okay, so it's not that funny, but it's the best I could come up with to lead into this story about a study that finds speaking two or more languages "may benefit our brains."  See the brief press release linked in this graf for more details.

Odds and Ends off the Net

 Here are a few of my favorite topics found on the net.

• Where do people get their legal knowledge?  TV, of course.  That's the result of a geographically narrow yet interesting little survey that probably surprises no one.  I often warn my own journalism students that the drama they see on television cop/court shows is nothing like the real world.  Most trials are dull, often painfully so, and rarely anything happens that will surprise you if you've taken the time to read depositions and the like.

• What's the most dangerous TV show?  Spartacus and Game of Thrones, at least in body counts, according to this story.  I've not watched the former, but the latter?  Oh yeah, I can see it.

• In another happy finding, young people are dumber than even you thought, at least when it comes to contraception and birth control.  Oh, great.

• Smartphones are turning us into "real time information seekers and problem solvers."  Really.  It says so here, on a tech website, so it must be true.  Actually the story is based on Pew data, an excellent info source.

Grazing on the News

I wrote a few years ago about a 2007 study on news grazers, the folks who skim the news, surf the channels, pick up bits and pieces of information along the way but who don't spend a lot of quality time on any one channel.  In that earlier study, grazers were younger, less informed, more likely to be men.

A 2011 study examines the same topic from a somewhat different perspective.  Grazers (or switchers, as they called them, since it focuses on people who flip channel to channel) in the 2008 election tended to be those who were more interested in the election and was positively related to political knowledge.

Huh?

Two very different portraits of a grazer.  In part these differences can be explained by measurement approaches and in part by the dependent variables examined.  In the earlier study, grazing was the dependent variable.  In the latter study, it's an independent or moderating variable.  And no doubt channel switching is a very specific behavioral concept while grazer in the earlier study is a bit more fuzzy and less television-specific.

I'm not sure what we can take from these two different results, other than a lesson in how we conceptualize and operationalize our variables can make all the difference in our results.

Sugar Makes You Dumber?

Sugar makes you dumber, according to a new study.

Well, it does -- if you're a lab rat, and dumped into a maze.

According to the study:  "Eating a high-fructose diet over the long term alters your brain's ability to learn and remember information. But adding omega-3 fatty acids to your meals can help minimize the damage."

So after a Coke you should eat some fish and, I suppose, break even.

Obviously the Corn Refiners Association (yes, such a thing exists) is not sweet on this study.  Fructose is in nature, they say.  It's okay.  Drink all you want.  Now, what were we talking about again?  And can someone get me out of this maze?

Fox News Makes You Dumb?

A Huffington Post piece addresses research I've written about previously, the surveys about what people know and the news networks they say they rely on most often.  The column speaks for itself.  Just passing it on with the caveat that it's all so very much more complicated (isn't it always?) than presented in the original study and in the HuffPo article.  Too busy to dig into now.

Public Opinion

It's getting harder and harder to find out what people think.

Basically, we're having an increasingly difficult time reaching and completing surveys, according to a new Pew report.

You may not think surveys are all that important.  You're wrong.

For a lot of reasons, surveys matter, and perhaps the biggest reason is that it's one way to know what people really think about an issue versus what some politician or corporation or TV talking head tells us what people think.  It's an instant fact-check for the folks who try to convince us they really have a secret line to the public mind.

The lower the quality the surveys, the more error that creeps in, and the more open they become to methodological challenges by people who'd rather tell us what they magically know about public opinion rather than asking real people what they think about the issues of the day.