Spring Break
Students know more politics than pop culture
Issue date: 4/19/07 Section: Features
Graham Rogers
Tufts Daily (Tufts U.)
(U-WIRE) MEDFORD, Mass. - According to a recent study by Tufts University political science professor Kent Portney, Tufts students may be leaving US Weekly at the newsstands and picking up The New York Times instead. The study, which was released in Feburary, found that students are more likely to be knowledgeable about the 2008 presidential race or Social Security reform than Britney Spears' latest marital difficulties.
Entitled "National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People," the study came to some surprising conclusions.
Not only are young people much more politically informed, the study found, but they know more about relevant politics than they do about popular culture.
"I was very surprised," Portney said. "I expected that students would be not very knowledgeable [about politics], and that they would know a lot more about pop culture."
The study was originally suggested by Tisch College Dean Rob Hollister and donor Jonathan Tisch as a way to measure the effectiveness of Tufts programs designed to increase civic engagement and awareness.
"We needed something to compare Tufts to," Portney said. The study was thus expanded to cover a national respondent base, using a survey conducted by the Palo Alto, Calif., contractor Polimetrix, which maintains a database of thousands of poll respondents across the country.
The questionnaire, a modified version of the one used by the Tisch College, was administered over the Internet to 1,000 non-military young people, all between the ages of 18 and 24. Of the students surveyed, 500 were full-time students at four-year colleges, and 500 were not full-time students.
The respondents were selected to match racial population distributions as closely as possible.
The questionnaire asked respondents to rate their political involvement across a series of categories, including questions about how often they voted, attended political events, or watched the news.
Tufts Daily (Tufts U.)
(U-WIRE) MEDFORD, Mass. - According to a recent study by Tufts University political science professor Kent Portney, Tufts students may be leaving US Weekly at the newsstands and picking up The New York Times instead. The study, which was released in Feburary, found that students are more likely to be knowledgeable about the 2008 presidential race or Social Security reform than Britney Spears' latest marital difficulties.
Entitled "National Survey of Civic and Political Engagement of Young People," the study came to some surprising conclusions.
Not only are young people much more politically informed, the study found, but they know more about relevant politics than they do about popular culture.
"I was very surprised," Portney said. "I expected that students would be not very knowledgeable [about politics], and that they would know a lot more about pop culture."
The study was originally suggested by Tisch College Dean Rob Hollister and donor Jonathan Tisch as a way to measure the effectiveness of Tufts programs designed to increase civic engagement and awareness.
"We needed something to compare Tufts to," Portney said. The study was thus expanded to cover a national respondent base, using a survey conducted by the Palo Alto, Calif., contractor Polimetrix, which maintains a database of thousands of poll respondents across the country.
The questionnaire, a modified version of the one used by the Tisch College, was administered over the Internet to 1,000 non-military young people, all between the ages of 18 and 24. Of the students surveyed, 500 were full-time students at four-year colleges, and 500 were not full-time students.
The respondents were selected to match racial population distributions as closely as possible.
The questionnaire asked respondents to rate their political involvement across a series of categories, including questions about how often they voted, attended political events, or watched the news.
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