1998 North Carolina Central University Political Attitudes Study The purpose of this study is to determine how engaging in different types of political discussions affects the political attitudes of African Americans. I conducted this experiment between January 1998 and April 1998 using student participants at North Carolina Central University (NCCU). The experiment consisted of three phases: a pretest survey instrument, an experimental manipulation, and a posttest survey instrument. Two hundred students took the pretest survey instrument. Ninety-eight students completed the second and third phase of the study.
During the first week of classes in January 1998, I administered the pretest to students in six different classes at NCCU. This first questionnaire included NES measures of partisanship, ideology, and perceptions of parties with respect to African-American interests. It also included measures of religiosity and feeling thermometers on social groups and political individuals. Additionally, it included measures of attentiveness to Black media sources and measures of political knowledge.
During April the students who completed the first questionnaire were asked to return to participate in the second half of the project. The student participants were randomly assigned to one of seven groups. Subjects in the reading only group were given a news article to read and asked to write a brief record of their feelings about the article.
The article subjects were asked to read was taken from the February 1998 issue of Essence magazine. The author, Sam Fulwood, discusses his experiences at both the 1995 Million Man March and the 1997 Stand in the Gap rally organized by the Promise Keepers. The subjects in the experiment did not know the source of the article or the name of the author, but the text of the story was exactly as it appeared in the Essence article.
After completing the tasks of reading and writing about the article, these subjects completed a second survey instrument designed to asses their political attitudes. In the peer discussion group, as in the read only group, subjects were asked to read a news article and record their feelings. After independently reading and writing these students were given twenty minutes to discuss what they had read with the other students in the room. After the twenty minute discussion each student then independently completed the second survey instrument.
The four other groups also involved subjects reading the news article, recording their feelings, and discussing the article for twenty minutes. But, in these four groups the subjects were guided in their discussion by an authority figure that purposely encouraged a specific ideological viewpoint. In the Feminism with a male leader group, an African-American man who was introduced to them as a minister guided subjects in their discussion. In this group the minister purposely advocated a Black Feminist position. An African American woman who was introduced to them as a professor led another group of students in discussion. She also purposely advocated a Black Feminist stance. In another variation of the manipulation, the male preacher and female teacher took purposely Black Conservative positions when leading other groups of students. A control group of subjects who were simply instructed to complete a second survey instrument serves as the basis for comparing each of the experimental manipulations.
To see the results of this research you can download the paper: Talking Black: The Effects of Group Interaction on Black Political Thought