Do We Still Need Media Use Measures At All?

The degree to which people seek and retain information about politics is a key variable for understanding why people think, feel, and act as they do politically. But measuring information acquisition has proven to be fraught with challenges. As a consequence, in recent years political scientists have shifted their measurement strategies to focus on information retention, most commonly in the form of factual knowledge questions. Interest in this approach ahs grown so much that some political scientists have begun to question whether the traditional media exposure measures are still worth asking. In this chapter, we argue that while the American National Election Studies (ANES) media exposure measures used in 2004 and before may have been problematic on methodological grounds, it is important to continue asking questions about the process of information acquisition. A measurement strategy based on information retention, we contend, requires survey instrumentation that is election-specific and unlikely to be valid over long stretches of time. The resulting problems of longitudinal continuity make this approach unsuitable as a stand-alone measurement strategy for the ANES. We suggest that an expanded set of retooled media exposure measures will provide researchers with eh variables needed to better understand the predictors of campaign knowledge, political attitudes, and voter turnout.