E.D. TABS

1996 National Household Education Survey: Adult Civic Involvement in the United States

March 1997

Introduction

This report presents data on the civic involvement of adults in the United States, including sources of information, community and political participation, and attitudes toward government and democratic principles. The data are from the 1996 National Household Education Survey (NHES:96), Adult Civic Involvement component.

Highlights

Sources of Information

Adults were asked about regular reading activity, that is, reading a newspaper at least once a week, reading magazines on a regular basis, or reading any books during the last months. They also reported on their sources of national news.

Highest level of education is associated with reading activity. Adults who did not complete a high school program are less likely to read a newspaper at least once a week (71 percent) than those with a high school diploma (85 percent), some college (89 percent), or a bachelor's degree or higher (91 percent, table 1). The same pattern exists for reading at least one magazine on a regular basis.

The percentage of adults who reported having read any books in the past 6 months increased significantly with each level of education. Percentages ranged from 42 percent of adults with less than a high school diploma to 83 percent of adults with a bachelor's degree or above (table 1).

U.S. adults are more likely to receive news about national issues on a daily basis from television or radio than from a newspaper or news magazine (table 2). Thirty-one percent said they read the national news in a newspaper or news magazine almost every day, while 75 percent said they watched the national news on television or listened to the national news on radio almost every day.

The percentage of adults who read the national news in a newspaper or news magazine almost daily increased with each age category, from those 18 to 24, to people 25 to 39, to those 40 to 54, to adults 55 or older. The Nation's younger and middle-aged adults, those 18 to 24, 25 to 39, and 40 to 54, also were less likely to report that they watched the national news on television or listened on the radio than were older Americans (table 2).

A lower percentage of adults who were parents with children 18 years old or younger living in the household (25 percent) reported reading about the national news in a newspaper or news magazine on a daily basis compared with those adults who had no children in that age range living with them (34 percent, table 2).

Knowledge of Government

Two five-item sets of questions about government were included in the survey. Each respondent was randomly selected to receive one set of questions.

On a five-item index of knowledge about government, about half of American adults (55 percent) answered three or more questions correctly (table 3).

A greater percentage of men (65 percent) than women (46 percent) and a greater percentage of people who are white and not Hispanic (61 percent) than people of other racial/ethnic groups (36 percent) scored three or more on the knowledge index (table 3).

An adult's highest level of education was also related to his or her score on the knowledge index. Fifteen percent of adults with less than a high school education, 43 percent of those with a high school diploma or equivalent, 67 percent of adults with some college, and 84 percent of those with a bachelor's degree or above answered at least three questions correctly (table 3).

Community Participation

Indicators of community participation included membership in an organization, attending religious services on a regular basis, and participating in community service.

Fifty-nine percent of adults belong to a community or professional organization, 50 percent attend religious services once a month or more, and 39 percent participate in ongoing community service (table 4).

Younger adults, those 18 to 39 years old, are less likely to belong to an organization or attend religious services regularly than are their elders, but they are just as likely to do community service on a regular basis (table 4).

More highly educated adults are more likely to participate in community service than those less educated. Approximately half of those with a bachelor's degree or above versus about 40 percent of adults with some college reported that they do community service work (table 4), and both of these groups are more likely than adults with a high school diploma or less to participate in that type of activity.

Adults who report that they read about or watch or listen to the national news nearly every day are more likely than adults who neither read about nor watch or listen to the national news on a daily basis to participate in more ways in their communities by belonging to an organization, attending religious services once a month or more, or doing community service (table 6).

Political Participation and Attitudes

Voting and five other types of political participation were measured, as well as skills related to civic participation. In addition, adults were asked their opinion about statements related to political efficacy and democratic values.

Persons who are white and not Hispanic are more likely than others to have said that they voted in the past 5 years. Eighty percent of white, non-Hispanics reported voting in contrast to 57 percent of those of another race/ethnicity (table 5).

Low scores on a five-item knowledge of government index are associated with low levels of political participation (table 6).

Thirty-seven percent of American adults believe that politics and government are too complicated to understand, and 42 percent perceive that their own families have no say in what the government does (table 7).

Eighty-three percent of U.S. adults agreed with a statement endorsing freedom of speech (table 7). Adults who have more education than a high school diploma were more likely than those having a high school diploma or less to agree that a speech against religion should be allowed. The percentages of adults endorsing a right to make such a speech ranged from 70 of those with less than a high school diploma to 93 percent of those with a bachelor's degree or higher.

Most American adults believe that they possess some skills that are useful for participating in political life. Ninety-two percent said that they could write a letter to a government official that clearly states their opinion, and 85 percent reported that they could make a comment or statement at a public meeting (table 8).

Improving Public Education

Adults gave their opinions on four potential actions that might improve public education. When Americans were asked their opinions about possible actions that might improve public education, the two that received endorsement from the highest percentage were evaluating teachers according to high performance standards (69 percent) and not promoting students until they met strict academic standards (63 percent, table 9).

The National Household Education Survey

The National Household Education Survey (NHES) is a data collection system of the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which has as its legislative mission the collection and publication of data on the condition of education in the Nation. The NHES is specifically designed to s~support this mission by providing information on educational issues that are best addressed by contacting households rather than schools or other educational institutions. The NHES provides descriptive data on the educational activities of the U.S. population and offers policy makers, researchers, and educators a variety of statistics on the condition of education in the United States.

The NHES is a telephone survey of the non-institutionalized, civilian population of the United States. Households are selected for the survey using random-digit-dialing (RDD) methods, and data are collected using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) procedures. From 45,000 to 64,000 households are screened for each administration, and individuals within households who meet predetermined criteria are sampled for more detailed or extended interviews. The data are weighted to permit estimates of the entire U.S. population. The NHES survey for a given year typically consists of a set of screening questions (Screener), collecting household composition and demographic data, and extended interviews on two substantive components addressing education-related topics. In order to assess data item reliability and inform future NHES surveys, each administration also includes data quality studies such as reinterviews with a subsample of respondents.

The primary purpose of the NHES is to conduct repeated measurements of the same phenomena at different points in time, although one-time surveys on topics of interest to the Department of Education are also conducted. Throughout its history, the NHES has repeatedly collected data in ways that permit estimates to be tracked across time. This includes repeating topical components on a rotating basis in order to provide comparative data across survey years. In addition, each administration of the NHES has benefited from experiences with previous cycles, resulting in improvements to the survey procedures and content. Thus, while the survey affords the opportunity for tracking phenomena across time, it is also dynamic in addressing new issues and including conceptual and methodological refinements.

A new design feature of the NHES program implemented in the NHES:96 is the collection of demographic and educational information on members of all screened households, rather than just those households potentially eligible for a topical component. In addition, this expanded screening feature includes a brief set of questions on an issue of interest to education program administrators or policymakers. In 1996, the topic was public library usage. The total Screener sample size is sufficient to produce state estimates of household characteristics for the NHES:96.

The NHES has been conducted in 1991, 1993, 1995, and 1996. Topics addressed by the NHES:91 were early childhood education and adult education. The NHES :93 collected information about school readiness and school safety and discipline. The 1991 components were repeated for the NHES:95, addressing early childhood program participation and adult education. Both components underwent substantial redesign to incorporate new issues and develop new measurement approaches.

The NHES:96

Parent and Family Involvement in Education and Civic Involvement were the two major topical components of the NHES: 96. Each topic addresses aspects of the National Education Goals. The Parent and Family Involvement component was guided by Goal 1, concerning children's readiness for school, and Goal 8, which encourages parental participation in education by recommending school promotion of partnerships with parents in the education of their children. The sample population for this component of the NHES :96 was children age 3 years through 12th grade. Their parents were interviewed about types and frequency of involvement with the school, student experiences that may be correlates of family involvement, school practices to involve and support families, and learning activities that take place in the home, including helping with homework. Older youth, that is, those in grades 6 through 12, also responded to some questions about family involvement in their education.

The Civic Involvement component was inspired by two other National Education Goals. Goal 3, dealing with student achievement and citizenship, states that students in America's schools will learn to "use their minds well, so they may be prepared for responsible citizenship ...," and Goal 6 says that adults should possess " . . the knowledge and skills necessary to... exercise the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. " There were three populations of interest for the Civic Involvement component of the NHES:96: students in grades 6 through 12, parents of those students, and U.S. adults. Adults were defined as persons 18 years or older, not currently enrolled in grade 12 or below, and not on active duty in the armed forces. This random sample of adults, some of whom were parents, was included in the Civic Involvement component to provide information on civic involvement that would be representative of the entire noninstitutionalized, civilian population.

The data in this report are from the Adult Civic Involvement component of the NHES:96. In this component, there were questions measuring general reading activity, as well as items focused on obtaining information about the national news from the media. Other items measured participation in the community and participation in a range of political activities. The Civic Involvement component included measures of attitudes and skills related to civic life. There were also two versions of a five-item test of knowledge of government; each was administered to one of two randomly selected split half samples of adults. Items asked in the Adult Civic Involvement component were similar to civic involvement items asked of parents and students. See the Technical Notes, page 14, for more information on the Adult Civic Involvement component and the NHES:96. Researchers who are interested in obtaining the data may do so by contacting NCES. (Contact information is on page ii.)

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Table 1.--Percent of U.S. adults reporting reading activity, by selected characteristics: 1996									
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			                                    Material and frequency
                                             -------------------------------------------------------	
Characteristic                  Number       Read a newspaper   Read one or more   Read any books in   Percent who
                              (thousands)     at least once a     magazines on a     past 6 months     reported all three     
                                                  week            regular basis                          types/1
                                                -------------      -------------     ---------------   -------------					
		                                Percent  s.e.	   Percent  s.e.     Percent    s.e.   Percent  s.e.
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Total 	                         188,233          85     1.0	    86	    0.9	       66	1.3	  54	1.3
									
Age									
 18 - 24 	                  21,345          81     3.4	    91	    2.1	       72	3.7	  56	4.0
 25 - 39                          64,157          83     1.7	    88	    1.7	       68	2.3	  55	2.3
 40 - 54                          50,442          87     1.7	    85	    1.7	       65	2.5	  55	2.6
 55 - 69                          31,396          90     1.9	    82	    2.3	       66	2.8	  56	3.0
 70 and older	                  20,893          87     2.4	    82	    2.5	       52	3.7	  41	3.3
									
Sex									
 Female                           98,437          84     1.3	    85	    1.3	       71	1.7	  57	1.8
 Male 	                          89,795          87     1.6	    87	    1.5	       59	1.9	  51	2.0
Race/ethnicity									
 White, non-Hispanic	         143,297          88     1.0	    87	    1.0	       68	1.5	  56	1.6
 Other race/ethnicity	          44,936          78     2.3	    82	    2.0	       58	2.5	  47	2.4
									
Highest level of education									
 Less than high school	          23,823          71     3.6	    66	    3.7	       42	3.5	  30	3.9
 High school diploma/equivalent									
  or vocational education 	  73,185          85     1.6	    86	    1.6	       57	2.1	  45	2.1
 Some college 	                  47,621          89     1.6	    89	    1.5	       74	2.3	  61	2.6
 Bachelor's degree or higher 	  43,604          91     1.3	    94	    1.1	       83	1.7	  74	1.9
									
Household income									
 $15,000 or less 	          38,583          74     2.9	    75	    2.9	       52	3.1	  37	3.0
 $15,001-30,000	                  47,833          83     1.9	    81	    2.3	       62	2.8	  47	2.8
 $30,001-50,000                   49,502          90     1.4	    90	    1.4	       69	2.3	  59	2.6
 $50,0010r more                   52,315          92     1.2	    94	    1.0	       76	1.8	  68	2.0
									
Parent with child age 18 or									
  younger in household/2									
 Yes 	                          71,646          85     1.6	    86	    1.6	       66	2.1	  55	2.2
 No	                         116,587          86     1.2	    86	    1.1	       65	1.7	  53	1.5
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/1 Read a newspaper at least once a weekand read one or more magazines on a regular basis and read any books in the past 6 months.									
/2 This question was asked of all respondents whose households contained members age 18 or younger and who were at least 12 years									
older than those children. "Parent" includes stepparent or guardian.									
NOTE: s.e. is standard error. Numbers may not add to totals because of rounding.
SOURCE: U.S. Department of Education, , National Household Education Survey, 1996, Adult
Civic Involvement component.
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Technical Notes

The NHES: 96 was conducted for the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, by Westat. Data collection took place from January through mid-April of 1996. The sample was selected using list-assisted, random-digit-dialing (RDD) methods and is nationally representative of all civilian, noninstitutionalized persons in the 50 states and the District of Columbia. As with the other NHES administrations, data were collected using computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) technology.

For the Civic Involvement component, questions were administered to 9,258 parents of 6th through 12th grade students, to 8,044 students in 6th through 12th grade, and to 2,250 adults 18 year> of age or older who were not enrolled in 12th grade or below and were not on active duty in the armed forces. The adults composed a separate random sample. This report is based on the responses of those randomly selected adults.

The sampling method used for the NHES:96 was a list-assisted, random-digit-dialing method/1. The list-assisted method is a single-stage, uncluttered method in which a simple random sample of telephone numbers is selected from all telephone numbers that are in 100-banks (the set of numbers with the same first 8 digits) in which there is at least one residential telephone number listed in the white page directory. Telephone numbers in this listed stratum include both listed and unlisted numbers. To support the research goals of the NHES: 96, telephone numbers in smaller states and telephone numbers in areas with high percentages of blacks and Hispanics were stratified and sampled at higher rates.

Approximately 161,400 telephone numbers were sampled. After sampling, they were randomly divided into two groups. One group, consisting of 95 percent of the numbers, became the pool of numbers in which a screening interview would be administered and then a Parent and Youth interview, encompassing the Parent and Farnil y Involvement in Education component and the Civic Involvement component, would be administered in eligible households. The other group of telephone numbers became the pool in which the same screening interview would be administered and the Adult Civic Involvement interview would be attempted in each household. Of the 55,838 completed screening interviews, 53,211 interviews (95.3 percent) were completed in households assigned to the parent and youth sample, and 2,627 interviews (4.7 percent) were completed in households assigned to the adult sample. One adult in each household in the adult sample was randomly sampled for the Civic Involvement interview with equal probability of selection.

The response rate for the screening interview was 70 percent. The Adult Civic Involvement interview completion rate, that is, the percentage of interviews conducted with the sampled adults, was 84 percent. Thus, the overall response rate for the interview was 59 percent (the product of the Screener response rate and the Adult Civic Involvement interview completion rate).

For the NHES:96, the item nonresponse rate (failure to complete some items in an otherwise completed interview) was very low. For some items in the interview, a response of" don't know" or refused was accepted as a legitimate response. Using an imputation method called a hot-deck procedure/2, responses were imputed for missing values (i. e., " don't know" or "refused" for items not specifically designated to have those legitimate response categories or "not ascertained"). AS a result, no missing values remain. The item nonresponse rates for variables in this report were generally less than 1 percent; nearly all had nonresponse of less than 3 percent.

Estimates produced using data from the NHES :96 Adult Civic Involvement component are subject to two types of error, sampling and nonsampling errors. Sampling errors occur because the data are collected from a sample rather than a census of the population. Nonsampling error is the term used to describe variations in the estimates that may be caused by population coverage limitations and data collection, processing, and reporting procedures. The sources of nonsampling errors are typically problems like unit and item nonresponse, the differences in respondents' interpretations of the meaning of the questions, response differences related to the particular time the survey was conducted, and mistakes in data preparation.

The objective of the NHES:96 Adult Civic Involvement component is to make inferences about the entire civilian, noninstitutionalized population age 18 years or older and not enrolled in 12th grade or below. An important nonsampling error for a telephone survey is the failure to include persons who do not live in households with telephones/3. The estimates were adjusted to totals of both telephone and nontelephone households derived from the Current Population Survey (CPS) to achieve this goal. The first step was the weighting associated with the sample of telephone numbers. A household weight was developed to account for the list-assisted sampling of telephone numbers, including the sampling rate differences for smaller states and by minority concentration strata. The weight was also adjusted for households that had more than one telephone number, hence more than one chance of being included in the sample. The household weight was the base weight for the subsequent weighting steps, which resulted in person-level weights, i.e., weights used to estimate the number of persons with different person-level characteristics. These steps included adjusting for nonresponse and raking to known population totals from the CPS.

Due to the requirements of another component in the NHES:96, two versions of a five-item knowledge of government test were developed and administered to split half samples. The half samples were randomly determined by the telephone number of the household; therefore, they were not precisely equivalent to each other in terms of the demographic characteristics of adults. For the analysis presented in this report, the weights for the half samples were standardized to national population totals. In constructing the knowledge scale that is based on the sum of correct answers to the set of five questions administered to the respondent, the standardized weights were divided by two, so that the totals sum to the population totals. Specific standardization procedures are described in the NHES:96 Data File User's Manual, Volume 1 (Collins et al. forthcoming).

The sample of households with telephones selected for the NHES :96 Adult Civic Involvement component is just one of many possible samples that could have been selected. Therefore, estimates produced from the NHES:96 sample may differ from estimates that would have been produced from other samples. This type of variability is called sampling error because it arises from using a sample of households with telephones, rather than all households with telephones.

The standard error is a measure of the variability due to sampling when estimating a statistic; standard errors for estimates presented in this report were computed Using a jackknife replication method. Standard errors can be used as a measure of the precision expected from a particular sample. The probability that a complete census count would differ from the sample estimate by less than 1 standard error is about 68 percent. The chance that the difference would be less than 1.65 standard errors is about 90 percent; and that the difference would be less than 1.96 standard errors, about 95 percent.

Standard errors for all of the estimates are presented in the tables. These standard errors can be used to produce confidence intervals. For example, an estimated 85 percent of adults reported that they read a newspaper at least once a week. This figure has an estimated standard error of 1.0. Therefore, the estimated 95 percent confidence interval for this statistic is approximately 83 to 87 percent.

The Rae-Scott adjusted Chi-square statistic was used as the significance test for table 6. For the other tables in this report, the statistic used was Student's t. As the number of comparisons at the same significance level increases, it becomes more likely that at least one of the estimated differences will be significant merely by chance, that is, it will be erroneously identified as different from zero. Even when there is no statistical difference between the means or percentages being compared, there is a 5 percent chance of getting a significant t value of 1.96 from sampling error alone. As the number of comparisons increases, the chance of making this type of error also increases.

A Bonferroni adjustment was used to correct significance tests for multiple comparisons. This method adjusts the significance level for the total number of comparisons made with a particular classification variable. All the differences cited in this report are significant at the 0.05 level of significance after a Bonferroni adjustment.

[1] Casady, R.J., and Lepkowski, J.M. 1993. "Stratified Telephone Survey Designs. " Survey Methodology, 19(1), 103-113.
[2] For additional information on the hot-deck procedure, see Kalton, G., and Kasprzyk, D. 1986. "The Treatment of Missing Survey Data." Survey Methodology, 12 (1):1-16.
[3] For additional information on telephone coverage issues and estimation procedures to correct for coverage biases, see J. M. Brick, Undercoverage Bias in Estimates of Characteristics of Households in the 1996 National Household Education Survey. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, , NCES working paper (forthcoming).

For more information about the content of this report, contact Kathryn Chandler at Kathryn.Chandler@ed.gov.