Instructions for final POL 205 Research Proposal paper Due Date: FINAL DAY OF CLASS BY THE START OF CLASS TIME ON OAKS (WORD DOCUMENT) The full research proposal due on the final day of class. Overall, your proposal should demonstrate that you have done serious and thorough reading on your topic of choice, have figured out a “gap” in the literature on your topic and have strategized a way to go about filling that gap with an appropriate study design. REMEMBER: YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY COLLECTING AND RUNNING DATA. THERE SHOULD BE NO ANALYSIS OR CUT AND PASTED DATA IN THIS PAPER. YOU ARE TELLING ME WHAT YOU WOULD DO. The proposal needs to be feasible. For example, you cannot propose projects that would: • Cost millions of dollars to execute • Use classified information or data this is impossible to gather • Physically or psychologically harm the subjects in the study • Break the law etc. The proposal should be written professionally. Academic research articles are not venues for informal writing. They are also not venues for authors to rant and rave about politics. Remember- our goal is to figure out the real, accurate patterns that exist in the world, not to argue that our candidate/party/beliefs are better than other peoples. Technical Directions: **PLEASE FOLLOW** • Times New Roman or Garamond font. Do not switch fonts throughout the paper. • 12-point size, 1-inch margins, 8-10 pages double-spaced (not counting reference page) • On the top of the page, please put your name and the title of your paper only. DON’T FILL SPACE WITH THE DATE, MY NAME, COURSE # ETC. Sections of the Paper: 1. Abstract: Your abstract should be one paragraph (and only one paragraph) in italics that summarizes the entire paper. This paragraph should be single-spaced. For an example of an abstract, look at the top of nearly any academic paper. The remainder of the paper is double spaced after the abstract. 2. Introduction: This should only be 1-2 paragraphs. No more. Introduce your topic and why it matters. Some people get straight to the point and others use a real-world example from government or politics to illustrate what they are about to discuss. It’s up to you but this should bring the reader in and state your research question at the end of it. 3. Literature Review: THERE IS A 15 SOURCE MINIMUM. This should be about 5-6 pages, double spaced. If you did a Type 2 for the 2nd paper, you must revise it using my comments for this final paper. If you did a Type 1 which does not lead to a specific question or hypothesis, you’ll have to rewrite most of the lit review for this part. Again, use my notes at the bottom of the Type 1 lit review for helpful hints. I WILL CHECK TO SEE IF YOU REVISED THE DOCUMENT USING MY COMMENTS OR IF YOU TURNED IN THE SAME EXACT WRITING. UNLESS I TOLD YOU EVERYTHING LOOKED PERFECT, YOU WILL LOSE POINTS IF YOU DON’T MAKE CHANGES. In this section you should summarize and synthesize the literature that speaks to your topic in a way that leads to a specific hypothesis. This means you need to think about your question and whether you need to combine literatures (ex: someone studying candidate race and election outcomes might need to combine the work on racial attitudes and elections) in order to produce a hypothesis. In Text Citations: If you are citing the conclusions of another study in the lit review, put the author’s name and the year it was published in parentheses. NO first names or paper titles. Example 1: A later field experiment by Gerber and Green (2008) found that social pressure increases voter turnout. Example 2: It is well established that social pressure has the ability to increase voter turnout (Gerber and Green 2008) Example 3: It is well established that social pressure has the ability to increase voter turnout (Gerber and Green 2008; Smith 2010) Hypothesis: Your hypothesis(es) should be denoted very clearly. For example, it might look like this: Hypothesis: Donations from major banks will have a negative relationship with a legislator’s vote on financial regulation: as donations increase, the probability of voting against regulations will decrease. 4. Research Design: In this section, which should be about 2-4 pages double spaced, you will outline how you are going to conduct your study. If your question has been studied before, make it clear that you are using a different method or context to study it and why this method has benefits that previous methods do not have. This section should very clearly tell the reader what general design you are going to use (observational, experimental, content analysis etc.), and then specify exactly what you’re doing within that type of design. The section should address the following and be written in proposal format (i.e. don’t use bullet points like I’m using below): • If you are doing an observational study: o Is this a cross-sectional or longitudinal study? A panel study? o What is your DV, IV and control variables? o How are you defining and measuring these variables (if it’s not obvious) o Where is the data coming from? ▪ Is this a survey you’re creating? If so, you don’t need to write out an entire survey but you do need to tell me the questions and response options that measure the DV/IV and controls. ▪ Are you planning to use the data from a well-known survey that has been conducted already? If so, which one? ▪ Is the data from websites or other databases? If so, which? How do they measure these variables? • If you’re running an experiment: What type of experiment is it? What are you manipulating and how are you manipulating it? (This is the IV). What is the DV? As you learned, experiments have built in controls but you might still want to measure other things about the subjects, especially if you are proposing an “interaction/moderating effect” (X affects Y but only for Z type of person). Be specific about how you are setting this up. Do you need to do a manipulation check? If yes, how will you test if you are manipulating the thing you think you’re manipulating? (Remember: in my southern accent study I had to get confirmation before I ran it that the southern accent actually sounded southern to people). • If you’re doing a content analysis: What are you coding? What categories/features/ characteristics of the content are being coded and how are they being coded? Who is doing the coding? How many people are doing the coding if you’re using people? • For all of the above methods: If you need to do sampling, who/what is your sample and why are you using them/using that sampling procedure? 5. Conclusion: End with a paragraph about why this study contributes something important to the political science literature. Also acknowledge the flaws of the study. 6. Reference Page: At the end of your paper there should be a reference page with the APA style citation for each source you cited throughout your paper. The references should be listed in alphabetical order. DO NOT LEAVE A REFERENCE IN ALL CAPTIAL LETTERS. DO NOT provide a DOI link to the papers you are citing unless the APA format tells you that a link is necessary for a certain source. Plagiarism: As with any college paper, your work must be your own. This means you cannot take someone else’s work and use it exactly/change it minimally/copy it in any way. Your proposal should be unique to the world. In the past I have seen students purchase papers online (and the professors have been notified of it), have friends write their papers for them and copy verbatim from papers they believe are obscure enough that the professor will not notice. Please- for everyone’s sakedon’t do this. It is taken seriously. Violation of these rules will result in consequences. Write something unique, awesome, and be damn proud of it! Running head: EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 1 Effect of Social Media on Public Opinion According to McKinney, Houston, & Hawthorne, (2014), public opinion can be considered as the collection of thoughts and views of most of the social group. Social media, unlike the mainstream media, allow all the users to participate in the creation and sharing of content through social networking. The social media include but not limited to Facebook, Twitter and opinion blogs that utilize internet technology. There is a wide range of literature on the effect of social media on public opinion. Some research shows that it has a different impact on public opinion which depends on public factors like age and its use. From a different perspective, social media is viewed to affect public opinion either positively or negatively (Price, 2008). This has influenced the approval or disapproval of its application by various organizations based on their operating principles. Following the popularity of social media, it is now central to the communication process, and its impact on public opinion is significant. A research study by Gorodnichenko, Pham and O Talavera (2018) using Twitter data for the Brexit referendum and 2016 US presidential election finds that bots are shaping the public opinion and voting outcomes. Another dimension is that the social media especially twitter conversations have been found inconsistent such that at times they are more liberal than the survey responses while at other times they are more conservative (McKinney, Houston, & Hawthorne, 2014). A research study by Weeks, Ardèvol-Abreu, and Gil de Zúñiga, (2017) show that opinion leaders in their social networks directly or indirectly change others political attitudes and behaviors. Literature Review EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 2 Social Media and Political Persuasion There is an extensive body of literature that shows social media is shaping individuals’ political opinions. The public exposure to dissenting political views in the social media leads to a change of one political opinion (Diehl, Weeks, & Gil de Zuniga, (2016; Weeks et al., 2017). Social media users have a strong dedication to build and maintain friend networks which influence individual political opinion. The use of news has been found central to political persuasion. The basis for a political opinion can be defined on the tendency to be persuaded. In other words, the literature shows that most people don't form political ideas that are independent of the world around them (Enikolopov, Petrova, & Zhuravskaya, 2011). This research study concludes that media (both social and mainstream) influence the political outcomes. The conclusion is significant in that access to independent TV channel increased the probability of voting to the opposition parties. The research defines that social media increases this level of independence in political opinions. Social media give great opportunities to discuss politics even though their main reasons for prevalence are to socialize. Other bodies of literature show that social media promotes political persuasion using fake news. The study by Allcott and Gentzkow (2017) indicates that in social media platforms like Facebook content is relayed to the public without fact-checking or third-party filtering. In this case, an individual author with no credibility and reputations can share fake news influencing the political opinions of the public in the broader scope. Most of the researchers cite the US 2016 presidential election to have thrived on false stories. Silverman, Craig (2016) showed that the fake news succeeding in the social media tended to favor Trump over Clinton. Commentators and researchers conclude that were it not by the influence of the fake news Donald Trump would not have been elected as the US president. The literature includes the EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 3 potential steps that could be taken to reduce the negative impact of fake news on social media on political persuasion. Other previous research had suggested that the source of the news would determine the level of persuasion. The research study by English, Sweetser, and Ancu, (2011) concludes that social media users pay attention to the message source. Considering that for this particular study the study population focused on those who used Youtube as a source of political information it contradicts the outcomes of results obtained from Facebook and Twitter messages. In other words, there is a need for sufficient literature that distinguishes the impact of each particular media platforms towards political persuasion. The research by Gorodnichenko et al., (2018) shows Twitter messages to have played a significant role in influencing the election of Donald Trump. There is a need to focus research on the most vulnerable social media platforms in which users fail to assess the credibility of information source before making a political judgment. Social Media and Public Disagreements There is a vast body of literature that shows social media has established a high level of disagreements on the core agendas. In other words, with social media, the aspect of the public opinion is in a confused state. People engage in debates and disagreements they would not otherwise be involved if they were using other platforms. According to the research study by Barnidge, (2015), social media can be positively related too political disagreements. The heavy social media users who are exposed to extensive information are in higher risks of a political disagreement than the light users. The political disagreements have negative impacts on the social relationships between users. The researches study Lee et al., (2014) shows that the use of social media has resulted in a high level of polarization of public opinion. In other words, since individuals are more likely to be exposed to the likeminded view and avoid the different EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 4 perspectives, they form extreme opinions in the direction of the original opinion of the subject. Social media users’ desires to remain accepted within the virtual social groups are thus likely to express only the accepted views. On the political affiliation, social media users will engage in disagreements that depicts them as part of the winning social group. There is enough literature that compares disagreements on social media platforms to face-face settings. According to Barnidge, (2017) the social media users perceive more political arguments than the non-users. This disagreement is viewed by social media more than in other settings. For the social media disagreements, the explorations are beyond the local context. There are social norms in the face-face relationships that discourage disagreements. For other anonymous settings like the message boards and community forums, individuals tend to visit only the like-minded discussions. This depicts that political disagreements are subjects of social media more than in other forums. From a different view, other literature suggests that social prevents exposure to political disagreements. Yang, Barnidge, & Rojas, (2017) identify common arguments that social media users have a unique way of avoiding political discussions which are uncommon to the non-users. The mechanisms of avoiding disagreements suggested in the research include algorithmic filtration or the particular affiliation. However, in conclusions, the research findings show that social media users are in exposure to more disagreements than the non-users unrelated to the affiliations. In other words, social media do not prevent exposure to political disagreements. The existing body of literature, however, has limitations on whether social media equally promotes resolutions to the arguments. There is a need to build the body of research to include if social media helps neutralization of the emerging disagreements. EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 5 Social Media and the Level of Public Participation There is an increased body of literature that shows social media encourage participatory political behaviors. In other words, there is a positive contribution from social media in engaging the public to give their political views. Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, and Valenzuela, (2012) suggest increased participation in public agenda, increased knowledge. The question, however, remains unsolved, and other literature indicates that social media deepen political and civic engagement. The social media platforms can be used to pull public participation in the agendas. According to Holt et al., (2013) the political involvement as a result of media differs across various age groups. The study concludes that social media use among young adults promotes civic participation. The population is in high use of social media and hence converge their participation into a broader scope of views. Continuous and increased involvement in the use of social media there will be an overall increase in the level of political interests in the future. In overall, the research findings are thus that the change in political participation is highly dependent on the population involved. Kushin and Yamamoto, (2010) find that the use of online media by college students during the 2008 elections significantly influenced political participation. For this particular area of research, literature has not included increased use of social media across all ages. While the 2008 election could have captured the use of social media for political reasons among the youth, there is a need to evaluate the participation across all ages. Conclusion The existing literature on social media effects on public opinion shows both positive and negative effects. One of the areas is increased persuasion of individuals on their political views. EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 6 Since literature indicates there is no independence in political opinions, social media promotes changing the views to fit on the various social groups. Social media equally influence the public towards political disagreements. While people can shy off from the political disagreements in the face to face platforms, they are more likely to participate in the differences in the social media platforms. Another effect of social media is increased participation in political agendas especially politics among the youth. The current literature, however, is limited in knowledge on the impact of increased use in social media across all ages to the subject of public opinion. Will the public opinion be polarized, or will it be more divergent? References Allcott, H., & Gentzkow, M. (2017). Social media and fake news in the 2016 election. Journal of economic perspectives, 31(2), 211-36. Barnidge, M. (2015). The role of news in promoting political disagreement on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 52, 211-218. Barnidge, M. (2017). Exposure to political disagreement in social media versus face-to-face and anonymous online settings. Political Communication, 34(2), 302-321. Diehl, T., Weeks, B. E., & Gil de Zuniga, H. (2016). Political persuasion on social media: Tracing direct and indirect effects of news use and social interaction. new media & society, 18(9), 1875-1895. English, K., Sweetser, K. D., & Ancu, M. (2011). YouTube-ification of political talk: An examination of persuasion appeals in viral video. American Behavioral Scientist, 55(6), 733-748. EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 7 Enikolopov, R., Petrova, M., & Zhuravskaya, E. (2011). Media and political persuasion: Evidence from Russia. American Economic Review, 101(7), 3253-85. Gil de Zúñiga, H., Jung, N., & Valenzuela, S. (2012). Social media use for news and individuals' social capital, civic engagement and political participation. Journal of computer-mediated communication, 17(3), 319-336. Gorodnichenko, Y, T Pham and O Talavera (2018), “Social media, sentiment and public opinions: Evidence from #Brexit and #USElection," NBER working paper 24631. Holt, K., Shehata, A., Strömbäck, J., & Ljungberg, E. (2013). Age and the effects of news media attention and social media use on political interest and participation: Do social media function as leveller?. European Journal of Communication, 28(1), 19-34. Kushin, M. J., & Yamamoto, M. (2010). Did social media really matter? College students' use of online media and political decision making in the 2008 election. Mass Communication and Society, 13(5), 608-630. Lee, J. K., Choi, J., Kim, C., & Kim, Y. (2014). Social media, network heterogeneity, and opinion polarization. Journal of communication, 64(4), 702-722. McKinney, M. S., Houston, J. B., & Hawthorne, J. (2014). Social watching a 2012 Republican presidential primary debate. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(4), 556-573. PCE (n.d.). Impact of Social Media. Retrieved from https://www.publicconsultationcanada.com/resources-and-ideas/impact-social-media/ EFFECT OF SOCIAL MEDIA ON PUBLIC OPINION 8 Price, V. (2008). Social identification and public opinion: Effects of communicating group conflict. Public Opinion Quarterly, 53(2), 197-224. Silverman, Craig. (2016). “This Analysis Shows How Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News on Facebook.” BuzzFeed News, November 16. Stempel, G H, T Hargrove and J P Bernt (2000), “Relation of growth of use of the Internet to changes in media use from 1995 to 1999”, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 77(1): 71-79. Weeks, B. E., Ardèvol-Abreu, A., & Gil de Zúñiga, H. (2017). Online influence? Social media use, opinion leadership, and political persuasion. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 29(2), 214-239. Yang, J., Barnidge, M., & Rojas, H. (2017). The politics of “Unfriending”: User filtration in response to political disagreement on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 70, 22-29.
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