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45%.

(No other occupation grouping exceeds 5%.) The government category encompasses those who work directly in state government jobs and those em

ployed at Florida State University. Forty-six percent of the adults have one or more years of college training; 15% of them exceed a bachelor's de

gree.

The student population in the Leon County public schools includes about one-fourth from rural areas. The racial distribution includes 29% black and 71% white children. The student body was integrated totally in 1967, and 30% of all students are now bused at public expense. In 1970, the faculty was integrated to meet the ratio specified by court orders.

The school system operates three high schools in Tallahassee. Amos P. Godby High School was chosen in collaboration with the research team and the school administration as the most representative of the area population. Permission for the conduct of the study was received from the Superintendent of Schools, Dr. Ned Lovell, and the Leon County Schools Advisory Committee on Research.

Subjects

At the high school, testing was conducted within virtually all classes teaching a required course in civics, for 9th graders, and classes teaching American History or its optional substitute, Comparative Systems, for 11th graders. Only a handful of 10th graders were in the 9th grade course, but the advanced course enrollment included 25% seniors.

In the study, five 9th grade classes in civics served as experimental groups and five served as control groups; among the older students, six classes were experimental and nine were controls. The disparity in number of classes for the older students was offset by the actual enrollment, i.e.,

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it was done to equalize the numbers of students in control and experimental

conditions.

At the first testing session, before any experimental treatments were introduced, the distribution of students showed that 28% were black and 72%

Among the 258

In all, the study began with 544 participating students. ninth graders, 131 were in the experimental treatments and 127 in the controls; among the 286 eleventh-twelfth graders, 147 were assigned to experimental conditions, and 137 to controls. The original allocation of subjects to experimental and control treatments provided approximate equalization on all anticipated demographic characteristics, with one exception. It was determined that proportionately more black students were in control groups (30%) than in experimental groups (23%). This difference was examined in analysis of the data.

Testing Waves

Three testing sessions were conducted with the experimental and control groups. The first, in late March, provided baseline data against which subsequent data were compared. The second testing was conducted in mid-May, immediately after the full set of experimental sessions had been introduced. The third testing was executed in the first week of June, a two-week delay from the second testing, to tap the longevity of some effects of the earlier experimental conditions. The first and second testings were 50-minute sessions, and the third required 10 minutes.

As would be expected, there was some attrition from test period to test period, for both the experimental and control subjects. At the first test

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session 544 students participated; at the second, 555 students were examin

ed, of whom 429 had completed questionnaires in the first session; at the

attrition. This third testing included 342 youngsters for whom three sets of data existed. The analyses and the presentation of results will specify the nature in which attrition was handled. Basically, however, many analy

ses are concerned with change from one time to another, and the subjects who participated in both or all three sessions were the basis for the final set of findings.

The Experimental Sessions

Students serving in the experimental treatments were exposed in their normal classrooms to six videotape recordings of programs broadcast on the "Today In The Legislature" series. The research team chose programming dates with no foreknowledge of what the program content would be. The six programs were seen over a five-week period. The younger students were shown a program on one day; the older students on a second day. Order of presentation was varied randomly across the six viewing sessions.

On specific evenings, the original broadcast was videotaped by the closed-circuit television facilities at Florida State University. For the next two days, that recording was used in the classrooms designated as experimental ones. The original broadcasts typically ran 60 minutes each. Editing reduced the tapes to 50 minutes each, to fit within the class periNo discussion of the programs was done with the students by the experimenters or the teachers.

ods.

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Public broadcast of the series began on April 3. The first experimental viewing sessions were April 11-12. There followed a two-week Easter Holiday in the schools. Subsequent viewing dates were April 25-26, May 2-3, 7-8, 9-10, and 14-15. Immediate posttesting was done on May 16-17, and the third testing session was June 4.

Post-hoc analysis of the major topics covered in these programs provides the following capsule summary of each of the programs seen by the experimental groups of students:

First program:

Committee meetings in which consumer affairs were dis

cussed; floor debates on an equal rights amentment and a change in property assessment; discussion of the alcohol consumption rights of 18-year-olds.

Second program:

Committee discussion on a bill to ban throw-away bottles

and cans in Florida, including the committee vote to kill the bill; the appearance on the Senate floor of the junior U.S. Senator from Florida, Lawton Chiles; a review of the progress of bills in committees of the House and Senate.

Third program: House action on an amendment and bill dealing with the consumption of alcohol by drivers, and the sale of alcoholic beverages in service stations; discussion of the legislation dealing with the conduct of election campaigns; a lengthy session debating the calendar of legislative activities.

Fourth program:

Action on a claims bill which waived the state's immu

nity to being sued for a particular constituent; the appearance of an 86-yearold guest to address the House, a woman who was an unpaid lobbyist for the general public; a lengthy film story on the capitol press corps and how it does its job; action on a bill which repealed higher mandatory limits of auto insurance.

29-801 0-74-App.- 5

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Fifth program: House debate on an 18-year-old majority rights bill, which focused on drinking and gambling issues, eventually voted on and passed; analysis of the work of the committee on rules and calendar, which established the schedule of business of the legislature.

Sixth program: A lengthy interview with Florida's Governor Askew; debate on a bail bond reform bill, with emphasis on how a bill can be altered through the amendment process, and then killed; hearings on the possibility of a state-wide grand jury to investigate organized crime in Florida. Study Variables

This study sought to examine the effects of exposure to this series of programs among adolescents. The effects which concerned us were all related to aspects of political socialization what kinds of attitudes might be

formed or altered, what information was obtained, what incentive for political participation may have occurred?

Specifically, the principal dependent variables were grouped as follows:
Political interest and communication, including continuing

1.

use of public television for political information

2. The individual's sense of political effectiveness

3. General evaluation of state legislators

4. Knowledge about politics

Here, we shall specify the operationalization of each of these study variables and, in a concluding section, identify additional information sought from the study participants.