“Dark Areas of Ignorance” Revisited Again: Has the Obama Election Affected the Knowledge Gap Between American and European College Students?

This research is a focused continuation of a longitudinal comparison of knowledge of the news across the Atlantic. In 1949 Kriesberg published “Public Opinion: Dark Areas of Ignorance,” an analysis of American knowledge about key foreign policy. A follow-up by Smith was published in 1970 titled, “’Dark Areas of Ignorance’ Revisited,” and another by Lyengar, Hahn, Bonfadelli and Marr in 2009—a comparison of knowledge in Switzerland and American. This paper is a partial replication of the Swiss-American comparison. We used the same questions when possible, updating questions about the Iraq war to the Afghanistan war in 2010. As exchange faculty at each other’s institutions, we assessed the knowledge of hard and soft news by our classes (n=85). While the expectation is that college students across the Atlantic will produce similar results to the general population, we hypothesize that the renewed interest in politics (verified by Pryor, Hurtado, DeAngelo, Blake and Tran in the HERI survey by UCLA The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2009) generated during the election of President Obama will reduce the gap. Furthermore, we go beyond the 2009 “Dark Areas of Ignorance” study and determine the media used and the frequency by college students to learn the news. Therefore, this study continues the tracking of one bilateral comparison and investigates the specific theme of knowledge of international affairs by comparing students in two universities.
Introduction