Jens 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.