NickGeidner.com

I recently ran some data for my HLM class looking at student newspaper availability and political enthusiasm and participation. I had null findings everywhere. Here are more specifics:

Hypotheses
H1: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact individual-level enthusiasm towards the 2008 presidential campaign.
H2: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to attend a campaign event.
H3: The availability of a student newspaper on a college campus will positively impact an individual’s likelihood to volunteer for a campaign.

Sample estimates
Level 1: Survey of 25,000 college students at 50 colleges and universities in 4 battleground states during October 2008.
Level 2: Newspaper data, enrollment, public/private, and aggregate candidate contact data derived for 32 of the above schools.

Controls
Level 1: Sex, Age, Race, Candidate contact, Political ideology, Political party, news media use, and political discussion
Level 2: Enrollment, Public vs. private, and aggregate campaign contact.

IV
“Student newspaper availability” was created by multiplying the average print run for the paper by the number of times is pass printed per week and then dividing by undergraduate enrollment. This gave a value which was equivalent to the number of newspapers printed per undergrad per week.

DV’s
Enthusiasm: 4 point scale (ran as ordinal logit model)
Attend campaign event: Dichotomous
Volunteer for a campaign: Dichotomous

Findings
In none of the models did student newspaper availability have a significant effect on the outcome variable (p=.165 to p=.865).

Uncategorized 2008 election, HLM, journalism, newspaper, null, presidential, research

“With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…” – Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address

To explain the incredible journey, which has been the last four years of my life, would be impossible. It was the fall of 2004 when I first heard of a young state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. At the time, I was working at a TV station in Youngstown and for the first time I was really paying attention to the presidential campaign.

In 2000, I had paid a little attention, but I never really connected the fact that this really affected me. In 2004, I knew it. I knew that we were choosing a president whose decisions and views would affect the future of our country. On the nights of the DNC, my friend Glenn and I got together and watched the speeches. When we saw soon-to-be Senator Barack Obama speak we were both blown away. As matter of fact, we were both, along with I assume most of the country, more impressed by him than the nominee, Sen. John Kerry.

Then election night came along and I was heartbroken. For the first time in my life, I found out that more than half the country did not see the world the same as me. More than half my countrymen didn’t see ending the war as important, didn’t see the assault on civil liberties as wrong, and didn’t seen all the other things the Bush regime did as important to fight against. This blew my mind. It took me a while to recover from that election.

I don’t think I really bounced back until the talk about freshman Senator Barack Obama’s possible presidential run stated surfacing. I was at grad school by this time at Ball State University. I was working on my master’s studying digital media with a focus on political communication. I knew from before the start that the Obama campaign was going to be an amazing case study of new media usage in political communication. So I started tracking him.

I immersed myself in Obama stuff. I read his books. I followed his website. I read news about him and I woke up early on a Saturday morning in February to watch a speech on the steps of the Illinois statehouse that would forever change the trajectory of our country. Over the next four months, I followed his new media campaign and in May wrote my thesis on the effects of new media in the early stages of the 2008 presidential election. In my thesis I basically said Obama’s web presence was going to change how people related to him and of all the campaigns Obama’s overall rhetorical strategy was most easily adaptable to the web.

I then moved to Columbus to work on my Ph.D. and over the summer volunteered for the campaign doing things like phone banking and canvassing. Election night came and I was relieved and amazed when Obama won, but it hadn’t fully sunk in. Honestly, it still hasn’t. For the first time, since I really connected presidential politics to my life, I am going to have a president I agree with, a president who I helped elect, a president who I feel represents and will fight for me and my views.

So now an hour away from the inauguration, I am flooded with emotions. I am excited for this change. I am excited for my country to get better. I love this country with all my heart and I want it to be good, not just for me, but for all Americans. I hope most that our country can move forward. That we can realize that above self and party comes county. I am restored in the hope that our country can work together “to bind up the nation’s wound.”

God bless the United States of America.

Uncategorized Obama, presidential, thoughts

I am co-authoring a paper with a professor here at OSU and for now I am just writing some notes on the general role of new media in the 2008 presidential election and how these new roles could affect communication research.

1) YouTube and other online video sharing – Unlike three television channel media system of the 1950’s, YouTube allows the user to have a seemingly endless amount of choice in their media experience. The rise of this type of media creates a number of important areas of future communication research.

a) Will online video add to theories of media fragmentation put forth by scholars, such as Sunstein (2002)? Communication researchers must begin to understand how individuals use these new media to gain information. Are they using it just to reinforce there own views or are they using it to gain new information about different/opposing views?

b) What is the environment of the online video? It is widely speculated that YouTube is driving by bitterly partisan videos, which deal with topics of a superficial nature. Like the USENET before it, content analyzes should be performed to extend this past simple speculation.

2) Datamining, content specialization, and targeting – Unexamined in most research on Internet and politics is a formal discussion of message targeting. More easily than with any media before it, the Internet allows the message creator to gather, store and access vast amounts of information about the reader/user. This information can be used to target messages for the specific user. The most famous example of this being the suggestion engine on Amazon.com. There is no reason this type of targeting couldn’t be apply to the political realm.

In the 2008 election, nearly all the candidate’s websites encouraged the user to give up personal information (e.g., e-mail and zip code). Some of the campaign’s use of this information might be benign or even helpful for the user (e.g., sending an e-mail when there is a local campaign event), but it could be much more. The candidates could use the information to reshape their whole website to highlight the issues important to the user and hide the issues unimportant to the user. This presents a number of ethical questions, which need to be examined, and presents a number of communication research issues and oppurtunities.

a) The ability to create many different specialized, database driven sites creates a huge problem for any type of systematic content analysis.

b) The effects of targeting on political outcomes in the online realm need to be understood better.

3) Social media – With the rise of Web 2.0, there has also been an increase in the ability to socialize on the Internet. This online socialization creates an interesting problem for communication research. Basically, we don’t know where to place these new communication technologies on the scale from intrapersonal to mass communication. For example, YouTube as mention above presents a number of problems for comm research, but then by adding the social element it gets even more muddy. For example, YouTube allows people to post response videos. If the user watches a video and then a response video are they watching two instances of mass communication or are they witnessing deliberation between two individuals. Social media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, etc) were used extensively throughout the 2008 election.

One way to understand their effects on political outcomes is to understand what kind of communication is occurring. Another way is to isolate an important variable which could mediate the effects of the media usage on political outcomes. One such variable could be connection or emotional attachment to the issue group, candidate, or online environment being examined. By isolating connection and examining how it varies in relation to media usage we can indirectly understand the effects of those media without having to limit our analysis to only the mass comm or interpersonal comm aspects of the media.

So that is what I am thinking for now. These are only idea starters and should not be assumed to be anything more than that. If anyone has any other thoughts or ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

Uncategorized 2008 election, election, holbert, presidential, research