Just logged onto this site for the first time in a couple of weeks and THANK YOU! So glad it is resonating.

Good question! (1) requires too much cognitive work to parse what it's asking for, (2) too much abstract thinking, (3) poorly differentiated response options (e.g. good chance vs strong chance)

The actual survey had probably 20 versions of this question. I almost never satisfice on surveys but I lacked the cognitive focus to interpret each one. Sorry, researchers.

same. just gonna go ahead and put it all on my FSA card.

Or, even worse, accurate.

this made me laugh out loud in the middle of a meeting

I'm excited for what I hope will be an increase in LLM-assisted descriptive content analysis...especially looking forward to when someone (who is not me) looks at the topics of news coverage across multiple outlets and time periods.

Agreed. I think they are often BETTER when they hand-write than when they type because they don't try to fancy it up and instead write more like they speak.

I switched to blue books a few years ago. It's fine! Student handwriting is mostly readable, the score distributions are similar, they have not lost the ability to write or concentrate or form coherent sentences. Students who need accommodations take at at our CDR, easy-peasy.

I think figuring out concrete strategies to deal with it is the opposite of letting down one's guard. It's acknowledging that it's a game changer and figuring out how to adapt.

[starts going through all of Drew's coauthors so I can figure out who to high-five at the next APSA]

(screenshot taken from the linked paper by @vinarceneaux.bsky.social @m-b-petersen.bsky.social and Mathias Osmundsen)

Also I love that you made a PDF blog.

I totally missed this (this is what happens when you log onto Bluesky only once every six weeks). And yes, I was assuming variation to measure causal effects -- I guess I shouldn't have said "descriptive" when what I meant was "causal inference that is not aimed only at 'proving' a 'theory'"

Work that looks at "who pays attention to what" definitely exists (much more in comm than in PSC, unsurprisingly -- I mean, the ELM is basically about attention) but it's a very scattered literature where the pieces rarely speak to each other.

And the fact that the discipline only rewards causal inference and new theories, not descriptive work. It would not be hard to do a large-N study where participants browse a website and you vary communicator/topic/etc, with the DV being attention. We'd learn a lot. But "where's the novel theory"? 🙄