Category: Child Psychology

Cambridge scientists have used an age-old fable to help illustrate how we think differently to other animals.

Lucy Cheke, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge's Department of Experimental Psychology, expanded Aesop's fable into three tasks of varying complexity and compared the performance of Eurasian Jays with local school children.

The task that set the children apart from the Jays involved a mechanism which was counter-intuitive as it was hidden under an opaque surface. Neither the birds nor the children were able to learn how the mechanism worked, but the children were able to learn how to get the reward, whereas the birds were not.

The results of the study illustrate that children learn about cause and effect in the physical world in a different way to birds. While the Jay's appear to take account of the mechanism involved in the task, the children are more driven by simple cause-effect relationships.

Lucy Cheke said, "This makes sense because it is children's job to learn about new cause and effect relationships without being limited by ideas of what is or is not possible. The children were able to learn what to do to get the reward even if the chain-of-events was apparently impossible. Essentially, they were able to ignore the fact that it shouldn't be happening to concentrate on the fact that it was happening. The birds however, found it much harder to learn what was happening because they were put off by the fact that it shouldn't be happening."

The tasks were a variation of Aesop's fable that consisted of using a tube of water containing an out-of-reach prize. The subjects were required to use objects to displace the water so that the prize could be reached.

The first task involved two tubes, one filled with a prize amongst sawdust while the other tube contained a prize floating out of reach in water. The subject was presented with objects and was to choose which tube with which to drop the objects into: the sawdust or the water. Dropping objects into the tube containing sawdust obviously did not raise the level of the prize, whereas dropping the objects into the tube containing water created displacement and raised the prize within the reach of the subject.

The second task involved only one tube of water with a floating prize, but the subject was given a choice of what type of object to drop into the tube: an object that floats or another that sinks.

The final task presented the subject with an apparatus that consisted of one u-shaped tube with a wide arm and one narrow arm, and one single straight tube. These were imbedded in an opaque base so that the joining of the U-tube was hidden and the apparatus appeared to consist of two identical wide tubes with a narrow tube between them. Both the u-tube and the straight tube were filled with water such that the level was equal between them. The prize was inside the narrow arm of the u-tube, too narrow for the subject to insert an object to create displacement. Therefore, the subject was forced to pick one of the wider tubes on either side. If they picked the Wide arm of the u-tube, then the level of the prize would rise, but if they picked the single tube, it would not. Because the join of the u-tube was hidden, it appeared to the subjects as if dropping an item in one tube caused the level of water in a different tube to rise: which is impossible.

The birds were unable to complete this task, whereas the children performed at the same level as in the previous tasks, easily determining which tube raised the level of the water through trial and error.

Lucy added, "The Aesops fable paradigm provides an incredibly useful means by which to compare cause-effect learning with understanding of underlying mechanisms, i.e. folk physics. We are planning on extending this paradigm to really try to understand what's going on in the heads of adults, children and animals when they deal with problems in the physical world."

Lucy continued, "We would like to thank the staff, children and parents at Godmanchester community primary school for taking part in the study."

Most people killed or wounded in stray-bullet shootings were unaware of events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries, and nearly one-third of the victims were children and nearly half were female, according to a new nationwide study examining an often-overlooked form of gun violence.

The study by Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis School of Medicine and Medical Center, examines mortality rates and other epidemiological aspects of stray-bullet shootings over a one-year period. It is published in the July issue of The Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery.

"Stray-bullet shootings alter the nature of life in many American neighborhoods, creating fear and anxiety and prompting parents to keep children indoors and take other precautions," Wintemute said. "When we think about gun violence, we think about high-profile and tragic events like Virginia Tech or the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. But stray-bullet shootings affect entire communities every day, and there has been almost no research exploring them."

Unlike the risk pattern for violence in general, which typically affects young males, most victims of stray bullets were outside the 15-to-34 age range, and nearly half (44.8 percent) were females, the study found. Many of the people shot (40.7 percent) were at home at the time of the incident, and of these, most (68.2 percent) were indoors.

In one case that typifies the random nature of these events, a toddler in New York was standing in her grandparents' house, where her family had gathered to watch a football game, when a bullet fired by a hunter 378 feet away came through the home's wall and struck the child in the torso. She died soon after at a local hospital.

In another case, a 51-year-old Ohio woman was paralyzed and later died when a bullet fired by a teenager shooting at two other fleeing teens struck her in the neck as she crossed the street near her home. Four days later, another woman driving on the same street was wounded by a stray bullet as two groups of teenagers fired at each other.

"Victims of stray bullets are essentially 'collateral damage' and are usually disconnected from the events that lead to their injury or death," Wintemute said. "They are innocent bystanders who typically have no opportunity to flee or take any other preventive measures."

To gather data for the study, Wintemute and his colleagues used Google and Yahoo! news alerting services and the news archives of GunPolicy.org to track stories published between March 2008 and February 2009 that contained the phrase "stray bullet." He defined stray-bullet shootings as episodes involving a bullet that escaped an intended sociogeographic space and injured at least one person, either from the gunshot itself or a secondary mechanism, such as an injury from glass sent flying by a bullet.

Within that framework, the study team identified 284 stray-bullet shootings events, in which 317 people were killed or injured. Most of the people shot (81 percent) were unaware of the events leading to the gunfire that caused their injuries. Of the 65 people who died during the monitoring period, most died on the day they were shot, and many died at the shooting scene.

The shootings were concentrated in big cities, and included scenarios involving violent conflicts (59.2 percent), hunting and other shooting sports (7.4 percent), and unknown activities (22.9 percent). Despite its frequent occurrence, celebratory gunfire related to holidays such as July 4th caused relatively few stray bullet injuries, accounting for less than 5 percent of the cases.

One limitation of the current study, Wintemute said, is its reliance on media reports to quantify stray-bullet shootings, which may have resulted in an underestimation of their frequency.

Wintemute said he hopes the findings will raise awareness of stray-bullet shooting and help lead to the expansion of preventive measures, such as "hot-spot policing," which involves increasing enforcement of firearm laws in areas with high levels of gun violence.

"Wearing body armor or taking other extreme protective measures is just not practical on a widespread scale, so we need to look at other ways to help communities feel safe from such events," Wintemute said. "Given that these stray-bullet shootings are a byproduct of gun violence in general, it's plausible that if you prevent the violence, you'll prevent the stray-bullet shootings."

Funding for this study was in received in part from the California Wellness Foundation and the Eli and Edythe L. Broad Foundation.

A new drug combination could offer hope to children with neuroblastoma — one of the deadliest forms of childhood cancer — by boosting the effectiveness of a promising new gene-targeted treatment.

Researchers at The Institute of Cancer Research in London have found a way to overcome the resistance of cancer cells to a drug called crizotinib, which recently showed positive early results in its first trial in children with cancer.

Crizotinib has already been licensed by the US Food and Drug Administration for use in adult cancers, but early experience suggests tumours eventually stop responding to treatment, after developing additional mutations in the ALK gene targeted by the drug.

The paper, led by The Institute of Cancer Research in collaboration with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Children's Hospital in Boston, publishes this week in the journal Cancer Cell. The study received funding from a variety of sources including The Neuroblastoma Society, Cancer Research UK, Sparks, the children's medical research charity and The Rooney Foundation.

In the study, scientists detailed their new strategy of combining crizotinib with a second class of drugs — mTOR inhibitors — to knock out the resistance of cancer cells.

Scientists identified the strategy after revealing for the first time the role played by the ALK cancer-causing gene in driving neuroblastoma, which accounts for 15 per cent of all the UK's childhood cancer deaths.

Neuroblastomas are cancers of the developing nervous system, and new drug combinations are desperately needed as aggressive forms of the disease are very difficult to treat with conventional chemotherapy.

Senior author Dr Louis Chesler, leader of the neuroblastoma drug development team at The Institute of Cancer Research and honorary consultant at The Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, said: "With the first paediatric clinical trial reporting substantial responses to crizotinib in patients with ALK driven tumours, we are looking for ways to increase the effectiveness of ALK inhibitors in general. We have identified a very promising way to overcome crizotinib resistance in neuroblastoma, by adding a second drug called an mTOR inhibitor. Many mTOR inhibitors are already in adult clinical trials."

"We hope that our work will benefit children with neuroblastoma by increasing the effectiveness of crizotinib. Our study may also have relevance for adult patients with ALK-driven lung cancer and lymphoma who develop resistance to crizotinib, because loss of treatment response in these patients correlates with the development of point mutations in the tyrosine kinase domain of ALK. In children with neuroblastoma these point mutations are in fact the most common primary somatic changes that we see in ALK, so we hope our work with a paediatric cancer will in this case help to unravel resistance mechanisms in adult cancer as well."

Neuroblastoma patients with ALK mutations frequently have alterations to the MYCN gene, which is closely linked to the development of aggressive neuroblastoma but is difficult to target directly with drugs.

The team therefore set out to investigate how a common ALK mutation, ALK^F1174L,and alterations in MYCN interact to drive the onset of neuroblastomas, and also to attempt to find a way to overcome resistance to crizotinib.

They found that the ALK^F1174L mutation and changes in MYCN cause more aggressive, crizotinib-resistant neuroblastoma, by turning on the PI3K/AKT/mTOR pathway. This pathway has been implicated in the development of neuroblastoma and many adult cancer types, and has been an intense focus of drug-development in adult cancer.

The team found that combining an mTOR inhibitor with crizotinib prevented the growth of neuroblastoma by simultaneously inhibiting MYCN and ALK, overcoming the resistance of these tumours to treatment with crizotinib alone. As well as delivering a strategy to overcome crizotinib resistance in general, this work highlights a treatment approach that may be effective for patients with aggressive neuroblastoma who carry both genetic changes at diagnosis.

Poor people hold more traditional values toward marriage and divorce than people with moderate and higher incomes, UCLA psychologists report in the current issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

The findings are based on a large survey about marriage, relationships and values, analyzed across income groups. They raise questions about how effectively some $1billion in government spending to promote the value of marriage among the poor is being spent.

"A lot of government policy is based on the assumption that low-income people hold less traditional views about marriage," said Benjamin Karney, a UCLA professor of psychology and senior author of the study. "However, the different income groups do not hold dramatically different views about marriage and divorce — and when the views are different, they are different in the opposite direction from what is commonly assumed. People of low income hold values that are at least as traditional toward marriage and divorce, if not more so."

Karney, who is co-director of the Relationship Institute at UCLA, added: "The United States is spending money teaching people about the value of marriage and family, and we are saying, congratulations, the battle has been won.."

The study consisted of 6,012 people, 29.4 percent of low income, 26 percent of moderate income and 34.7 percent of high income. In the sample, 4,508 people lived in Florida, 500 in California, 502 in New York and 502 in Texas. The results from the four states were very comparable. The research was based on phone surveys that lasted an average of 27 minutes each. The participants were asked the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements.

Lower income people held slightly more traditional values on the following statements than people with higher income:

"Divorce can be a reasonable solution to an unhappy marriage."

"When there are children in the family, parents should stay married even if they no longer love each other."

"It's better for a family if the man earns a living and the woman takes care of the family."

"A husband and wife should be of the same race or ethnic group."

The values among all groups were equally traditional on the following statements:

"A happy, healthy marriage is one of the most important things in life."

"Children do better when their parents are married."

"People who have children together should be married."

Low-income people hold much more traditional attitudes about divorce and are less likely to see divorce as a reasonable solution to an unhappy marriage, Karney said. One area where low-income groups are less traditional, he said, is on the acceptability of single parenting.

These findings raise an obvious question: If poor people hold traditional values about marriage and divorce, why are their marriage rates lower and their out-of-wedlock births much higher than those of higher incomes? The answer, Karney said, is that values often do not predict behavior, and they don't in these areas. He noted that most people do not consider lying to be a good value, yet large numbers of people lie nevertheless.

"Why are low-income women postponing marriage but having babies?" Karney asked. "Because they don't want to get divorced. They think if they marry their current partner, they are likely to get divorced — and couples that have financial strain are much more likely to have marital difficulties. It's like these women have been reading the scientific journals about marriage; their intuition is absolutely correct.

He said many of these low-income women have no models for a successful marriage, and the marriages they see are in trouble. Also, they do not trust their financial and family future with the men they know. "However, they know they can raise a child," he said. "They may have been raised by a single mother, and people all around them were raised by single mothers. They see single-parent families that succeed, and they see the role of mother is valued."

Karney said that an affluent 18-year-old girl does not want to get pregnant because that would interfere with her plans for college, her career and a future husband. A poor 18-year-old looks at what awaits her; she doesn't see herself becoming a lawyer or even a college graduate. "But if she becomes a mother, she gets respect, purpose and someone to love her — and she doesn't need to be married to do that," he said. "She knows she can be a mom; she doesn't know if she can be married forever."

Why are low-income women willing to have babies before they are willing to get married?

"It's not because they don't care about marriage," Karney said. "They care about marriage so much that they are unwilling to do it the wrong way. In their communities, motherhood and marriage are two separate things. Girls who think they have somewhere to go in life don't get pregnant; girls who think they have nowhere to go are less careful about contraception."

Thomas Trail, UCLA postdoctoral fellow is psychology and lead author of the study said that lower income partners are no more likely to struggle with relationship issues than are higher income partners. "They have no more problems with communication, sex, parental roles or division of household chores than do higher income couples," he said.

Do low-income people have unrealistically high standards toward marriage? Karney and Trail found no evidence of that.

"They're more realistic," Karney said.

Sustaining a marriage or long-term relationship depends on how well you are able to manage the daily tasks of life, he noted.

"For some people, those tasks are more challenging because of what they have to contend with," Karney said. "A marriage is part and parcel with the rest of your life. Your values turn out to be a pretty small factor in the success of a marriage. Even if you love marriage and are deeply committed to the institution of marriage, practical issues that are making your life difficult matter more.

"Low-income couples are practical and realistic in their views on marriage. We should listen to what they are telling us, rather than imposing 'solutions' that do not match what they really need."

The best way to lower teen pregnancy rates, he said, is to increase social mobility. Government money would be better spent helping low-income people with the day-to-day challenges in their lives, he said.

"There is a lot you can do with a billion dollars to promote marriage, including helping people with child care and transportation; that is not where the money has been spent," Karney said. "Almost all of that money has been spent on educational curricula, which is a narrow approach, based on false assumptions. Communication and emotional connection are the same among low-income people as in more affluent group. Their unique needs are not about relationship education. None of the data support the current policy of teaching relationships values and skills. Low-income people have concrete, practical problems making ends meet."

The study, titled "What's (Not) Wrong With Low-Income Marriages," is based on data collected in 2003, after the federal government (under President George W. Bush) began a "healthy marriage initiative" that still exists. The data predate the recession, but Karney suspects the findings would apply to an even larger extent today than when he collected the data.

Obesity is not to blame for poor educational performance, according to early findings from research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). In a study that combines statistical methods with genetic information, researchers dispel the false idea that being overweight has damaging educational consequences.

Previous studies have shown that children who are heavier are less likely to do well at school. However, Dr Stephanie von Hinke Kessler Scholder from University of York argues it's vital to understand what drives this association. "We sought to test whether obesity 'directly' hinders performance due to bullying or health problems, or whether kids who are obese do less well because of other factors that are associated with both obesity and lower exam results, such as coming from a disadvantaged family," Dr Scholder explains.

Researchers examined data on almost 4,000 members of the Children of the 90s Birth Cohort Study. These data include the children's DNA. It is well known that genes are randomly allocated within a population, irrespective of factors such as socio-economic position. The researchers combined the latest developments from genetic epidemiology with statistical methodologies in economic and econometric research. Using two carefully chosen 'genetic markers', the research team was able to identify children with a slightly higher genetic pre-disposition to obesity.

"Based on a simple correlation between children's obesity as measured by their fat mass and their exam results, we found that heavier children did do slightly worse in school," Dr Scholder points out. "But, when we used children's genetic markers to account for potentially other factors, we found no evidence that obesity causally affects exam results. So, we conclude that obesity is not a major factor affecting children's educational outcomes."

These findings suggest that the previously found negative relationship between weight and educational performance is driven by factors that affect both weight and educational attainment. Future research should focus on other determinants of poor educational outcomes, such as social class or a family's socio-economic circumstances, Dr Scholder points out.

The finding that obesity is not a cause of poorer educational performance is, the researchers suggest, a positive thing. "Clearly there are reasons why there are differences in educational outcomes, but our research shows that obesity is not one of them," Dr Scholder argues.

Many people these days feel a sense of "time famine" — never having enough minutes and hours to do everything. We all know that our objective amount of time can't be increased (there are only 24 hours in a day), but a new study suggests that volunteering our limited time — giving it away — may actually increase our sense of unhurried leisure.

Across four different experiments, researchers found that people's subjective sense of having time, called 'time affluence,' can be increased: compared with wasting time, spending time on oneself, and even gaining a windfall of 'free' time, spending time on others increased participants' feelings of time affluence.

Lead researcher and psychological scientist Cassie Mogilner of the University of Pennsylvania believes this is because giving away time boosts one's sense of personal competence and efficiency, and this in turn stretches out time in our minds. Ultimately, giving time makes people more willing to commit to future engagements despite their busy schedules.

This new research, conducted by Mogilner and co-authors Zoe Chance of the Yale School of Management and Michael Norton of Harvard Business School, is forthcoming in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

Major life events such as marriage or the birth of a first child have a detrimental effect on job satisfaction, according to a study by Kingston University's Business School.

Researchers found that people feel significantly less happy at work for up to five years after the birth of their first child. They also discovered that the negative effect of major life events on job satisfaction is considerably stronger for women.

The study, published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, tracked the annual job satisfaction levels of nearly 10,000 people in the UK between 1991 and 2008. It also suggested that there is a peak in happiness at work just prior to marriage and the birth of a first child, as people anticipate these life-changing events.

"Quite often how you feel about your job is determined by outside factors. Before the happy life event, people may experience increased job satisfaction because of the 'spillover' effect, where happiness at home influences happiness at work," report author Professor Yannis Georgellis, Director of the Centre for Research in Employment, Skills, and Society at Kingston Business School said. "But afterwards, people's focus inevitably shifts more towards home life as priorities change and the work-life conflict kicks in. This is particularly true for people when they start a family."

The findings suggest that the birth of a first child has a much greater and longer-lasting negative impact on how employees feel about their jobs. "People are less happy at work for up to five years after their first baby is born, though the effect seems to be stronger for women, especially those in the public sector," Professor Georgellis added.

He suggested that these findings should prompt employers in the UK to consider more generous maternity leave. "In Scandinavian countries they have very generous maternity leave provisions and jobs are held open for people — perhaps that should be the case in the UK," he said. "Sweden, for instance, allocates parents 480 days per child, of which the father must take 60, and which can be taken any time until the child is eight years old."

Perhaps less surprisingly the study also indicated that higher earnings exert a positive and significant effect on job satisfaction across the board. This was again with the exception of women working in the public sector — suggesting that women in this kind of job are more likely to be motivated by non-monetary rewards.

Long working hours were shown to have a detrimental effect on happiness at work, especially in the private sector, while employees who had recently changed jobs reported higher levels of job satisfaction.

— Compared to breakfast-eaters, breakfast-skippers tend to weigh more and have other unhealthy habits, such as consuming too many sugary drinks or high-calorie snacks, according to a panel discussion during a symposium at the Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) 2012 Annual Meeting & Food Expo.

Research shows about 18 percent of Americans older than age 2 regularly skip breakfast, said Nancy Auestad, PhD, vice president of regulatory affairs at the Dairy Research Institute. They are missing out on key nutrients, she said, pointing to statistics that show breakfast-eaters get about 17 percent of their daily calories from breakfast as well as a significant portion of their daily recommend intake of several key nutrients, such as Vitamin D (58 percent), Vitamin B12 (42 percent) and Vitamin A (41 percent).

In addition, studies of young people found that breakfast-skippers consume 40 percent more sweets, 55 percent more soft drinks, 45 percent fewer vegetables and 30 percent less fruit than people who eat breakfast.

"Most of these negative factors were abbreviated when breakfast was consumed, compared with breakfast-skippers," said Heather Leidy, PhD, assistant professor in the department of nutrition and exercise physiology at the University of Missouri. "Targeting that behavior could lead to a reduction in obesity."

Leidy conducted research focusing on the role of protein in breakfast, and she found that the effects of breakfast-skipping were felt throughout the day. She assembled a group of 10 breakfast-skipping teenagers and split them into groups that consumed no breakfast, a normal-protein breakfast and a high-protein breakfast. By measuring their hunger levels and several other indicators, she found that eating a healthy breakfast of any kind lead to more satiety and less overeating throughout the day, but these benefits were especially prominent among the teens who ate the high-protein breakfast. They consumed about 200 calories less in evening snacking, she said.

Her study also used magnetic resonance imaging to determine that a protein-rich breakfast reduces the brain signals controlling food desires, even many hours after breakfast.

Despite the benefits of consistently eating breakfast, all the participants in Leidy's study went back to being breakfast-skippers within six months, citing the lack of available healthy, high-protein foods. This means the food industry has to work to create more of these options to fit into the lifestyle of busy kids and adults.

Test performance can improve dramatically if students are offered rewards just before they are given standardized tests and if they receive the incentive immediately afterward, new research at the University of Chicago shows.

Educators have long debated the value of financial and other rewards as incentives, but a series of experiments in Chicago-area schools showed that with the right kind of rewards, students achievement improved by as much as six months beyond what would be expected.

The rewards apparently provide students with an incentive to take tests more seriously. One implication is that policymakers may underestimate students' ability in otherwise low-performing schools, according to the research team that conducted the experiments.

Researchers used financial rewards to boost performance for older students and non-financial rewards, such as trophies, to improve performance among younger students.

The prospect of losing a reward created a stronger desire to perform than the possibility of receiving a reward after a test, the research showed. Students who were given money or a trophy to look at while they tested performed better.

"Most importantly, all motivating power of the incentives vanishes when rewards are handed out with a delay," said lead author Sally Sadoff, a 2010 PhD graduate in economics, who did the research as a Griffin Postdoctoral Scholar at UChicago from 2010-11.

Sadoff, now an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego, was part a team that conducted a series of experiments involving 7,000 students in the Chicago Public Schools as well as in elementary and high school districts in south-suburban Chicago Heights.

The team studied the impact of incentives on students taking relatively short, standardized diagnostic tests given three times a year to determine their grasp of mathematics and English skills. Unlike other tests on incentives, the students were not told ahead of time of the rewards so they could not study but rather demonstrated the impact of the rewards themselves on performance.

The research was reported in the paper, "The Behaviorist Goes to School: Leveraging Behavioral Economics to Improve Educational Performance," published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Sadoff was joined in her work by John List, the Homer J. Livingston Professor in Economics and one of the nation's leading scholars of experimental economics; Steven Levitt, the William B. Ogden Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at UChicago; and Susanne Neckermann, a scholar at the Center for European Economic Research in Germany.

The team found that elementary school students, who were given nonfinancial rewards, responded more to incentives than high schoolers. Those students were given trophies, as they have been found to be more responsive to non-monetary rewards than older students.

Among high school students, the amount of money involved in the incentive mattered. Students performed better if offered $20 rather than $10.

"At Bloom Township High School, when we offered students $20 incentives, we found that their scores were 0.12 to .20 standard deviation points (five to sixth months in improved performance) above what we would otherwise have predicted given their previous test scores," Sadoff said.

List pointed out that the results of the experiments challenged a conventional theory that giving students tangible rewards "crowds out intrinsic motivation, rendering such approaches ineffective in the short run and potentially detrimental in the long run."

The students tested had low initial motivation to do well, and thus benefited from the rewards, List said. He added that follow-up tests showed no negative impact on removing the rewards in successive tests.

The research helps teachers and school leaders better understand the role of rewards in school performance. Most rewards are delayed and involve a very distant horizon, such as the prospect of making a better salary as an adult as the result of better school performance, the team pointed out.

"The effect of timing of payoffs provides insights into the crux of the education problem that we face with our urban youth," the authors write. "Effort is far removed from the payout of rewards, making it difficult for students to connect them in a useful way. The failure to recognize this connection potentially leads to dramatic under-investment," as students fail to apply themselves and policymakers don't realize the students' full potential.

The research was supported by a grant from the Children First Fund, the Kenneth and Anne Griffin Foundation, the Rauner Family Foundation and the Spencer Foundation.

The MacArthur Research Network on Youth and Participatory Politics (YPP), under the direction of co-principal investigators University of Chicago political scientist Cathy Cohen, and Joseph Kahne, professor of education at Mills College, has unveiled the findings of the largest nationally representative study to date of new media and politics among young people.

The national survey questioned 3,000 young people, ages 15-25 on how they use the Internet, social media and engage in politics. Unlike any prior study on the topic, the YPP survey included large numbers of black, Latino, and Asian American respondents, allowing for unique statistical comparisons across race. The data present one of the most complete pictures to date of how young people are using new media in new ways to engage politically, providing relevant insights on both the long-term political picture in America and the upcoming 2012 election.

The study report, "Participatory Politics: New Media and Youth Political Action," shows that contrary to the traditional notion of a technological digital divide, substantial numbers of young people across racial and ethic groups are engaging in "participatory politics" — acts such as starting a political group online, circulating a blog about a political issue, or forwarding political videos to friends. Like traditional political acts, these acts address issues of public concern. The difference is that participatory acts are interactive, peer-based, and do not defer to elites or formal institutions. They are also tied to digital or new media platforms that facilitate and amplify young people's actions.

"As the 2012 election approaches, it is important to realize how young people, especially youth of color, are using new media to amplify their voices in the political realm," said Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor in Political Science. "Not only did we find that large numbers of youth take part in participatory politics, but, defying conventional expectations, black and Asian-American youth are the most avid users of new media for friendship and interest-driven activities. Moreover, black youth participate in online forms of participatory politics at rates equal to or slightly higher than white, Latino and Asian-American youth."

"Anyone who cares about democracy needs to pay attention to this important dimension of politics for young people — participatory politics spread information, mobilize individuals to act, and provide many ways for youth to voice their perspectives," said Kahne. "But there are challenges. These politics also spread misinformation, and they may promote voice more than influence. When we asked young people if they thought they and their friends would benefit from learning more about how to tell if online information was trustworthy, 84% said, 'Yes!' In massive numbers, youth are saying they need help with digital media literacy."

The YPP national survey and analysis of the data was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, whose $100-million digital media and learning initiative aims to determine how digital media are changing the way young people learn, play, socialize, and participate in civic life. The research was conducted by Kahne and Cohen and a team of three researchers: Benjamin Bowyer and Ellen Middaugh at Mills College and Jon Rogowski at the University of Chicago. The study has an overall margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. Among the key findings:

Access to and Use of Internet and Social Media

Large proportions of young people across racial and ethnic groups have access to the Internet and use online social media regularly to stay connected to their family and friends and pursue interests and hobbies:

• A majority or near-majority of white (51%), black (57%), Latino (49%), and Asian American (52%) youth report sending messages, sharing status updates and links, or chatting online daily.

Participatory politics are an important dimension of politics:

• 41% of young people engaged in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months, while 44% participated in other acts of politics.

• Specifically, 43% of white, 41% of black, 38% of Latino, and 36% of Asian American youth participated in at least one act of participatory politics during the prior 12 months.

Participatory politics are an addition to an individual's engagement rather than an alternative to other political activities:

• U.S. citizens who were 18 or older and who engaged in at least one act of participatory politics were twice as likely to report voting in the November 2010 elections as those who did not engage in participatory politics.

• A large proportion — 37% of all young people — engages in both participatory and institutional politics.

• Among young people who engage in participatory policies, 90% of them either vote or engage in other forms of politics.

Participatory politics are equitably distributed across different racial and ethnic groups:

• Contrary to the notion of a technological digital divide, the YPP study finds that overwhelmingly, white (96%), black (94%), Latino (96%) and Asian American (98%) youth report having access to a computer that connects to the Internet.

• The difference in voting in 2008 between the group with the highest rate of turnout according to the U. S. Census Bureau — black youth (52%) — and the group with the lowest rate of turnout — Latino youth (27%) — is 25 percentage points.

• In contrast, the difference between the group with the highest rate of engaging in at least one act of participatory politics — whites (43%) — and the groups with the lowest rate of engaging in at least one act of participatory politics — Asian Americans (36%) — is only 7 percentage points.

Taking into account participatory politics, institutional politics, and voting, black youth are the most likely to have participated in at least one form of these activities:

• Engagement is highest among black youth, with only 25% reporting no engagement in any form of political behavior, compared with 33% of whites, 40% of Asian Americans, and 43% of Latinos.

Credibility of Online News and Information

• Youth now consume news through participatory channels. 45% of youth reported getting news at least once a week from family and friends via Twitter or Facebook feeds. This rivals the 49% who got news at least once in the past week from newspapers or magazines. Youth believe they would benefit from learning how to judge the credibility of what they find online.

• Survey respondents were asked, "Do you think people like you and your friends would benefit from learning more about how to tell if news and information you find online is trustworthy?" — 84% said, "Yes."

"While we can probably assume that youth will learn to use their cell phones without formal instruction," Kahne said, "They may well benefit from supports and programs in both school and out-of-school settings that strengthen their ability and desire to produce media that is informed, persuasive, and distributed effectively."

"A key question that emerges from these findings is: 'Are we prepared to provide the resources, supports and media literacy training necessary for youth of color to transfer their digital social capital into influence in the political realm?'," noted Cohen. "Participatory politics offers a political realm where voices of young people are at the center and driving the agenda. Are we prepared to embrace their innovation, support their engagement, and give them greater control, voice, and potentially influence over the issues that matter most in their lives?"

Methodology

The Youth Participatory Politics survey was conducted by Knowledge Networks (KN) on behalf of Mills College. The survey was administered through online and telephone modes from February 9, 2011 to July 14, 2011. Both modes were administered in English- and Spanish-language versions. The median online respondent completed the survey in 35 minutes, and the median telephone interview lasted 44 minutes. The target population for the survey comprised young people between fifteen and twenty-five years of age living in the United States from four ethnic/racial groups: non-Hispanic whites, non-Hispanic blacks, non-Hispanic Asians, and Hispanics (of any race). In order to be able to make meaningful comparison across racial and ethnic groups, the study also included oversamples of African Americans, Asian Americans, and Hispanics.