The Social Factors that Explain Why People Follow and Avoid the News

• In Event: I Will Follow: Local News Engagement

Abstract

How do social pressures shape news habits?

Previous research has shown regularly accessing news improves political knowledge (Barabas, Jerit, Pollock, and Rainey 2014) and helps people make political choices that better align with their core concerns (Hochschild and Einstein 2015). While interest in news is highly correlated with socioeconomic status (Althaus, Cizmar, and Gimpel 2009), these associations may not be causal (Prior 2019). Past work has mainly examined the impact of socialization (Edgerly et al. 2018; Kruikemeier and Shehata 2017) as well as individual personality characteristics (David 2009; Gerber et al 2011), but this paper builds on a wide-ranging literature largely outside of political science, which emphasizes the importance of social factors in shaping media habits—what we have elsewhere described (in press) as a sense of belonging to communities of other news users.

This study builds on past inductive research on news habits that drew on qualitative interviews from 2016-2019 (N = 133) with individuals in three countries. Those in-depth interviews generated several hypotheses, which are tested in this paper using a nationally representative survey of Americans (N = 2000). The survey includes detailed questions about attitudes and behaviors toward media and the network of people respondents say they talk to about “important matters” including but not limited to news.

Specifically we investigate the relationship between having a large number of conversation partners highly interested in news (and likely to discuss it) and rates of news consumption and other attitudes toward news. We also examine how feelings of exclusion from conversations about news relate to news consumption.

Results have implications for understanding the motivations underlying news use and strategies for developing news habits among populations otherwise currently disengaged.

Authors

• Benjamin Toff, University of Oxford

• Ruth Palmer, IE University