Fact Tank - News In Numbers | Pew Research Center

Visitors explore an interactive exhibit on pterosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. (Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images)

Spoiler alert: If you haven’t already done so, test yourself with our new Science Knowledge Quiz.

U.S. racial and ethnic groups vary significantly in their knowledge of science-related issues, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that quizzed Americans about subjects ranging from life and physical sciences to numeracy and chart reading.

About half of whites (48%) got at least nine of 11 questions correct. In comparison, much smaller shares of Hispanics (23%) and blacks (9%) correctly answered at least nine of the questions.

On average, whites got 7.6 questions correct while Hispanics got 5.1 and blacks 3.7. English-speaking Asians got an average of 7.0 correct answers, but it’s important to note the survey was only conducted in English and Spanish. (Asians are less likely than whites and blacks, but not Hispanics, to be proficient in English.)

There were large differences by race and ethnicity across all the individual science knowledge questions in the survey. For example, 46% of whites correctly identified the main components of antacids as bases. In comparison, one-quarter of Hispanics and 16% of blacks got the correct answer on this question. And 88% of whites correctly answered that antibiotic resistance is a major concern of antibiotic overuse, while 62% of Hispanics and 53% of blacks answered this question correctly.

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Topics:

Science and Innovation Race and Ethnicity Public Knowledge

By Phillip Connor and Ana Gonzalez-Barrera

Substantial shares of people in three African nations – Nigeria, Tunisia and Kenya – say they plan to move to another country within five years, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in 2018.

Some who plan to migrate say they have taken steps to do so, such as gathering information about a destination country and saving money.

In the three African nations, two-thirds or more of all who were surveyed cite jobs, education and reuniting with family as reasons why people leave their countries. Conflict also plays a role: In Nigeria and Kenya, majorities say escaping violence is a very or somewhat important reason for why people leave the country. (See the survey’s topline for detailed results.)

In Nigeria, Africa’s most populated nation, nearly half (45%) of adults say they plan to move to another country within five years, by far the highest share among 12 countries surveyed across four continents. Meanwhile, a quarter (24%) of adults in Tunisia say they plan to leave within five years, as do 19% in Kenya. In 2017, substantial shares in Senegal, Ghana and South Africa said the same.

These findings highlight the potential for more migration from an area of the world with a fast-growing population. In recent years, many African countries have seen a sharp increase in outmigration.

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Topics:

Global Migration and Demography Migration Sub-Saharan Africa Immigration

By Elizabeth Grieco and Amy Mitchell

A majority of Americans believe local journalists should not express their views on local issues, but Republicans are considerably more likely than Democrats to feel this way, according to a new Pew Research Center survey that also finds substantial partisan differences over other aspects of local news reporting.

Overall, 61% of U.S. adults feel that local journalists should not share their views about local issues and events, compared with 36% who say they should, according to the survey, conducted Oct. 15-Nov. 8, 2018, among nearly 35,000 U.S. adults.

Republicans and GOP-leaning independents are more than twice as likely to say local journalists should not express their views (71%) as they are to say they should express their views on local issues (28%). Democrats and Democratic leaners are more evenly divided, with 54% saying local journalists should not express their views and 44% saying they should. The partisan divide on this question is similar to one found in an earlier Pew Research Center survey that asked whether the news media in general should present the facts with some interpretation, rather than without interpretation.

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Topics:

Political Party Affiliation Local News Trust, Facts and Democracy News Audience Trends and Attitudes News Media Ethics and Practices Political Polarization Trust in Institutions U.S. Political Parties News Sources News Media Sectors

By John Gramlich

The U.S. media environment has changed considerably in recent years and the local news landscape is no exception, according to a new Pew Research Center survey of nearly 35,000 U.S. adults. Just as it has nationally, the rise of digital media has reshaped local news when it comes to the information sources people turn to.

Even as the public remains deeply divided in its views of the national news media, the survey finds that most Americans believe their local news outlets are doing a good job in areas such as reporting the news accurately (71% say this), keeping an eye on local political leaders (66%) and dealing fairly with all sides (62%).

Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at the Center, oversaw the study. In this Q&A, she discusses some of the report’s main takeaways and what the survey tells us about the connection between Americans and their local media.

In a nutshell, what does this survey find about the way Americans consume local news and how they feel about the journalists who produce it?

Amy Mitchell, director of journalism research at Pew Research Center

One overarching takeaway is that even as TV stations continue to have the widest reach when it comes to local news, digital outlets are an important part of the equation. Nearly as many Americans today prefer to get their local news online as from their TV set.

What’s more, news providers in the digital space don’t just consist of the websites of traditional news organizations. Americans are staying up to date through other kinds of digital information sources, too, ranging from local government agencies to online forums and discussion groups to community newsletters and listservs. Individually, these sources can’t compete with TV, radio and newspapers in terms of audience, but together, they’re a substantial part of the local information diet for many people.

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Topics:

Local News News Media Trends News Audience Trends and Attitudes News Interest News Media Sectors

By Katerina Eva Matsa and Nami Sumida

Local news is an integral part of American communities, providing information on everything from local politics and government to local sports and schools. A new Pew Research Center survey conducted Oct. 15-Nov. 8, 2018, among 34,897 U.S. adults examines how Americans get local news and their attitudes toward their local news media. In addition to results at the national level, the scope of the survey makes it possible to search for, examine and download findings about the local news environments of 99 distinct areas across the United States through an online, interactive feature.

Interactive: What are the local news dynamics in your city?

Explore detailed profiles of local news attitudes and behaviors across the U.S.

In the interactive, you can explore:

What pathways (such as TV, social media or print) local residents use to get their local news, and what types of sources are used most often;
How connected the local news media are to their community;
How residents evaluate their local media on a number of key journalistic roles;
What local news topics residents are most interested in; and
How easy it is for them to get information on these topics.

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Topics:

Local News News Media Trends News Audience Trends and Attitudes News Interest News Media Sectors

By Kat Devlin and Courtney Johnson

Indians try out electronic voting machines in Mumbai in January, ahead of the country’s upcoming general elections. (Indranil Mukherjee/AFP/Getty Images)

As many as 900 million people are expected to vote in India’s national elections in April and May. The elections come amid a recent increase in tensions between India and Pakistan, as well as allegations that mobile applications including WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter are fueling the spread of fake news in the world’s largest democracy.

Two surveys conducted by Pew Research Center in 2018 shed light on how adults in India see their elected officials and their democracy – as well as how they feel about the spread of misinformation via mobile technology. Here are five key findings from the surveys as Indians prepare to cast ballots:

1Most Indian adults see politicians as corrupt and question whether elections are effective. About two-thirds (64%) say most politicians are corrupt, including 43% who very intensely hold this view, according to a spring 2018 survey by the Center. Notably, nearly seven-in-ten supporters of the two major parties contesting the election – Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Indian National Congress party – share the view that most elected leaders are corrupt (69% in each party say this). On a related question, only a third of Indians think elected officials care about the opinions of ordinary people in their country.

Meanwhile, 58% of adults in India say that no matter who wins an election, things do not change very much. This again includes a majority of both BJP and Congress supporters.

Despite these negative views, Indians think their country allows other democratic values to flourish. By more than two-to-one, for example, Indians say the rights of people to express their own views are protected and that most people have a good chance to improve their standard of living. A sizable share (47%) also believes the courts treat everyone fairly.

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Topics:

Trust, Facts and Democracy International Governments and Institutions Asia and the Pacific Democracy

By Cary Funk and Brian Kennedy

Recent surveys by Pew Research Center and other organizations have shown wide public divides over science-related issues such as climate change and food science. But public confidence in the scientific community as a whole has remained stable for decades, according to data collected by NORC, an independent research organization at the University of Chicago.

Overall, 44% of Americans have a great deal of confidence in the scientific community, while 47% have only some confidence and 7% have hardly any, according to the group’s 2018 General Social Survey, released March 19. This is roughly the same share as in 2016, when 40% said they had a great deal of confidence in scientific leaders. (The 4-percentage-point uptick does not reach statistical significance.)

Public confidence in the scientific community stands out as among the most stable of about 13 institutions rated in the GSS since the mid-1970s. Confidence in medicine has been somewhat less stable, however. It declined in the early 1990s and has ticked downward again in more recent years, from 41% in 2010 to 36% in 2016 and 37% in NORC’s most recent survey.

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Topics:

Business and Labor Science and Innovation Trust in Institutions

By Nikki Graf, Anna Brown and Eileen Patten

The gender gap in pay has narrowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2018, women earned 85% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 39 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2018.

By comparison, the Census Bureau found that, in 2017, full-time, year-round working women earned 80% of what their male counterparts earned.

The 2018 wage gap was somewhat smaller for adults ages 25 to 34 than for all workers 16 and older, our analysis found. Women ages 25 to 34 earned 89 cents for every dollar a man in the same age group earned.

(To understand how we calculate the gender pay gap, see our 2013 post, “How Pew Research Center measured the gender pay gap.”)

The estimated 15-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2018 has narrowed from 36 cents in 1980. For young women, the gap has narrowed by a similar margin over time. In 1980, women ages 25 to 34 earned 33 cents less than their male counterparts, compared with 11 cents in 2018.

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Topics:

Gender Income Inequality Work and Employment Income

By Monica Anderson

Smartphones and social media are now an almost universal feature of teenage life in the United States. More than nine-in-ten U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they have access to a smartphone or use social media, according to a 2018 Pew Research Center survey. But this increased connectivity can come with challenges for teens – as well as their parents. As part of our research into Americans’ digital lives, the Center also surveyed over 1,000 parents of teens to better understand their experiences with raising teens in the digital age.

Here are seven key findings about parents, teens and digital technology:

1A majority of parents are concerned about the types of experiences their teen might encounter online. Roughly two-thirds of parents of teens (65%) say they worry at least some about their teen spending too much time in front of screens, including a third who worry a lot about this. Parents express comparable levels of concern about other potentially negative online experiences for their kids: About six-in-ten say they worry a lot or some about their teen losing the ability to have in-person conversations, sharing too much about themselves online, being bullied online or exchanging explicit messages.

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Topics:

Family Roles Teens and Technology Teens and Youth Emerging Technology Impacts Technology Adoption Family and Relationships Parenthood

By Kat Devlin and Christine Huang

Chinese President Xi Jinping with the Chinese and French national flags during French President Emmanuel Macron’s January 2018 visit to Beijing. Xi is heading to France this week to discuss relations with potential investment partners. (Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty Images)

Chinese President Xi Jinping is visiting France, Italy and Monaco this week to strengthen relations with potential European investment partners, though he does so at a time when EU countries lack confidence in him and do not embrace the idea of Chinese global leadership, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Xi has been promoting the Belt and Road Initiative, China’s global infrastructure program that would stretch from East Asia to Europe. The United States and European Union have voiced concern that the initiative is an effort by Beijing to project its influence abroad via projects in sectors ranging from banking to telecommunications to a far-reaching network of railways, energy pipelines, ports and highways. The U.S. has also referred to it as “China’s infrastructure vanity project.” However, the Italian government recently signaled support for participating in the initiative.

In all but one of the 10 European countries surveyed, majorities said in a spring 2018 survey that they had no confidence in Xi to do the right thing regarding world affairs. The Spanish were the most skeptical of him, with more than three-quarters (79%) lacking confidence, followed by the French (69%), Greeks (64%) and Italians (64%). A substantial portion of Europeans – roughly two-in-ten or more in Poland, Greece, Hungary and Italy – did not express an opinion on Xi.

Opinions of China as a nation were similarly low in Europe. Only in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands did roughly half have a positive opinion of China. In the other European countries surveyed, about four-in-ten or fewer had positive opinions of China. Italians had the most negative evaluations, with only around three-in-ten saying they had a favorable view of China.

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Topics:

Western Europe China Global Balance of Power Asia and the Pacific Europe

NEWS IN THE NUMBERS

Science knowledge varies by race and ethnicity in U.S.

Many Nigerians, Tunisians and Kenyans say they plan to leave their countries in the next five years

Most Americans – especially Republicans – say local journalists shouldn’t express views on local issues

Q&A: What Pew Research Center’s new survey says about local news in the U.S.

Explore local news habits in your city with our new interactive

Interactive: What are the local news dynamics in your city?

Indian elections nearing amid frustration with politics, concerns about misinformation

Public confidence in scientists has remained stable for decades

How parents feel about – and manage – their teens’ online behavior and screen time

Few Europeans confident in Xi as he seeks to extend Chinese economic influence in the region

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