At the outset of the election year, a Pew Research Center study found Democrats and Republicans increasingly relied on two divergent media ecosystems. During the course of the presidential campaign, the Americans News Pathways project reexamined these news habits multiple times, with a particular focus on partisans who got more news from outlets with audiences […]
One major challenge researchers may encounter in designing surveys about news consumption: Does the U.S. public understand the range of concepts being measured – concepts that are constantly evolving as news organizations adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape? This chapter examines this question from several angles, including the public’s overall familiarity with – and use […]
Another way of understanding people’s sense of the news is to ask about their knowledge of current events. The survey asked five separate fact-based questions related to issues in the early days of the Biden administration, including the number of doses required for the available COVID-19 vaccines and the administration’s initial goals surrounding vaccine distribution. […]
Given the challenges of survey research detailed above, it is worth considering other approaches to measuring news consumption – especially when it comes to getting news online. One possibility is so-called “passive” data, in which respondents’ online activity is recorded automatically by a computer tracker. Several vendors now offer these types of panels: They recruit […]
The data used in this report was collected from nine surveys conducted between November 2019 and November 2020 on Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP). The surveys were all a part of the Center’s American News Pathways project, in which the same 12,043 panelists were surveyed repeatedly between November 2019 and November 2020 on […]