People in the United States tend to live in ideological clusters--there are "red" states and "blue" states, or at least red counties and blue counties. Political ideologies are not simply randomly distributed around the country--instead, most people live close to people who share their political beliefs.
Political clustering represents an association--there is an association between one's own political beliefs, and the political beliefs of the surrounding population.
You can probably come up with at least two reasons why this happens. For one, people's political beliefs are probably, to some extent, shaped by being exposed to the beliefs of others around them. People convince each other. Another story is that people who have the choice to move, might move to a geographical region that has more people who share their beliefs. Conservatives might want to move to conservative areas, and liberals might want to move to more liberal ones.
Here are some exerpts from an NPR interivew by journalist Shankar Vedantam about some research testing one of these explanations:
I spoke with psychologist Brian Nosek at the University of Virginia. He's been tracking more than a million Americans and they revealed two things about themselves: one, their political orientation and two, their zip code.
Here he is.
BRIAN NOSEK: What we found is that people's current zip code was more aligned with their ideology than their past one. So, liberals who had lived in more conservative districts were more likely to now live in more liberal zip codes, and vice versa for conservatives.
VEDANTAM: So basically, what the data is suggesting is when liberals find themselves in a conservative zip code, they're more likely to get up and move. When conservatives find themselves in a predominantly liberal area, they're likely to do the same.
Here's a laboratory study that further tested what they learned from the zip code study:
...a Ph.D. student ...working with [the University of Virginia's] Brian Nosek, Matt Motyl; he devised this interesting experiment. He manipulated people's ideology to see what effect it had on their desire to pick up and move. He gave people a questionnaire that was designed to trick them into feeling either more liberal or more conservative than they really were.
He then gauged how moving people's ideology, what effect this had on their willingness to move, and he found that when people sense that they were living among the enemy - so to say - they had a greater desire to pick up and leave.
a) What are the hints in the explanation above that the study they are describing is an experiment, not a correlational study?
b) What are the two main variables in this study? Classify each variable as an independent or dependent variable.
(Are you wondering how they tricked people into feeling more liberal or more conservative? Check the story. )
c) What kind of design does this appear to be? (Post-test only? Pretest-posttest? Concurrent measures? Repeated measures?)
d) Why do you think it was important to design the study as an experiment?
e) If you were conducting this study, how might you measure "willingness to move"?
