Newswise — A national survey announced today in "USA Today" measures a key component in America's social health by ranking the culture and resources for reading in America's 70 largest cities. This year's edition of the survey also explored the possibility of a correlation between the rankings for literacy and political affiliation.
The study -- "America's Most Literate Cities 2006" -- identifies the top ten cites in this order: Seattle; Minneapolis; Atlanta, and Washington, DC tied for third place; St. Paul; Pittsburgh; Cincinnati; Denver; San Francisco; and Portland, Ore.
Those cities emerged at the top of the national study, which develops a statistical profile of cities with populations of 250,000 or more. This is the fourth year of the study, which is available online at: http://www.ccsu.edu/AMLC06
The study's author, Dr. John W. Miller, president of Central Connecticut State University, said: "This study attempts to capture one critical index of our nation's social health -- the literacy of its major cities. This study focuses on six key indicators of literacy: newspaper circulation, number of bookstores, library resources, periodical publishing resources, educational attainment, and Internet resources. The information is compared against population rates in each city to develop a per capita profile of the city's long-term literacy.
"This set of factors measures people's use of their literacy and thus presents a complex and nuanced portrait of our nation's cultural vitality. From this data we can better perceive the extent and quality of the long-term literacy essential to individual economic success, civic participation, and the quality of life in a community and a nation," Miller said.
The ranking is necessarily an interpretation of data. What matters most is not whether the rank ordering changes," MiIler said, "but what communities do to promote the kinds of literacy practices that the data track."
Miller also explored the possibility of a correlation between the rankings for literacy and political affiliation. This year, after gathering voting data from the 2004 presidential election, Miller discovered significant correlations between political affiliation and the AMLC's overall ranking and rankings in the subcategories. Briefly and generally, the cities that voted heavily for U.S. Sen. John Kerry were ranked higher in the AMLC (overall and in five of the six categories) than were the cities that voted heavily for President George W. Bush. The differences were very significant in the overall category: the cities voting for Kerry ranked on average at No. 27 in the survey; the Bush cities ranked on average at No. 51. The Kerry cities were: Buffalo, New Orleans, Boston, New York City, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore, Cleveland, San Francisco, Newark, Oakland, and Detroit. The Bush cities were: Plano, TX, Colorado Springs, Bakersfield, Mesa, Arlington, TX, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Anchorage, Wichita, Corpus Christi, Jacksonville, FL, Anaheim, Omaha, Houston, and San Antonio.
Miller also explored the reported general decline in newspaper readership and the question: Is one of its causes the reported rise in online reading of newspapers? "The AMLC surveys from 2003-2006 indicate there is indeed a widespread decline in per capita newspaper circulation," he said. "It is happening in cities where overall literacy is high -- Seattle, for example -- and in cities where it is low. But the data does not indicate a switch from reading newspapers to reading online news."
Miller continued: "Cities in which newspaper circulation has declined precipitously (over 10%) for three straight years, generally rank modestly in the 'middle of the pack' and lower for online newspaper reading. For example, Seattle, with a 12% decline in per capita newspaper circulation, ranks only No. 17 in online news reading circulation."
By way of contrast, Miller noted that "for the cities in which circulation either remained stable or increased during this period, the ranking for online news reading is comparatively high. Indianapolis, for example, which has had stable per capita circulation for the period, ranks No. 3 for online news reading, and Cincinnati, which has experienced a steady rise in per capita newspaper circulation, ranks No. 7 for online news reading."
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