To more than one pundit, last week’s election in the United Kingdom looked like it would be the closest in a generation. But at SurveyMonkey’s Palo Alto, California, headquarters, thousands of miles away, things looked very different: Respondents to an online poll conducted by the Internet survey company from April […] Read more »
From Telephone to the Web: The Challenge of Mode of Interview Effects in Public Opinion Polls
Among the most striking trends in the field of survey research in the past two decades is the shift from interviewer-administered to self-administered surveys. … But the results from self-administered and interviewer-administered surveys are sometimes different. This difference is called a mode effect, a difference in responses to a survey […] Read more »
Issue-Specific Activism on Climate Issues on Facebook
… Pew has fond that more people engage with issue groups online than political officials, and there are several examples of social media campaigns – the Red Equal Sign campaign and the ALS Ice Bucket challenge most notably – where issue-based activism has occurred. Working with colleagues Ashley Anderson, John […] Read more »
Facebook Study Disputes Theory of Political Polarization Among Users
For years, political scientists and other social theorists have fretted about the Internet’s potential to flatten and polarize democratic discourse. Because so much information now comes through digital engines shaped by our own preferences — Facebook, Google and others suggest content based on what consumers previously enjoyed — scholars have […] Read more »
State of the News Media 2015
Call it a mobile majority. At the start of 2015, 39 of the top 50 digital news websites have more traffic to their sites and associated applications coming from mobile devices than from desktop computers, according to Pew Research Center’s analysis of comScore data. CONT. Amy Mitchell, Pew Read more »
Americans’ Views on Open Government Data
Government reformers and advocates believe that two contemporary phenomena hold the potential to change how people engage with governments at all levels. The first is data. There is more of it than ever before and there are more effective tools for sharing it. This creates new service-delivery possibilities for government […] Read more »