Research Note: Using Google Search Data for Agenda Setting Research
February 7th, 2009 | Science | Tags: agenda setting, Google, ScienceJens Vogelgesang and I presented a small paper on using Google’s search query data for the measurement of the public agenda at a joint Journalism/Methods conference today. The working paper is available here and the abstract below. Comments are, of course, very welcome.
The reliable and valid measurement of issue salience is a key problem of agenda setting research. While exposure, awareness and salience are usually investigated using surveys, the behavioral consequences of those processes, like follow-up communication or information seeking, lend themselves very well to observation. Many theoretical models of agenda setting incorporate these concepts, but only few empirical studies exist that actually measure salience-driven behavior. We propose a new method for measuring aggregate issue salience by analyzing data from search queries typed into Google. We illustrate this approach with a case study from the 2005 Bundestag elections in Germany, focussing on the fiscal expert Paul Kirchhof of Angela Merkel’s campaign team. Using both survey and online observation data, we find substantial correlations between the two longitudinal measures of issue salience.We both should be working on other things, like our PhD theses, but those small empirical studies are too much fun.
August 31st, 2010 at 2:16 am
Sick of obtaining low numbers of useless traffic for your website? Well i want to tell you about a new underground tactic which makes me personally $900 daily on 100% AUTOPILOT. I really could be here all day and going into detail but why dont you just check their website out? There is really a great video that explains everything. So if your seriously interested in producing quick hard cash this is the site for you. Auto Traffic Avalanche