2 results
Measuring Emotional Response: Comparing Alternative Approaches to Measurement*
- George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, Michael B. MacKuen
-
- Journal:
- Political Science Research and Methods / Volume 5 / Issue 4 / October 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 November 2015, pp. 733-754
-
- Article
- Export citation
-
Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it with the long used “radio button” item format. We assess the reliability and validity of these two approaches to the measurement of affect. The study examines self-report measures of emotion to three generated news stories about terrorist threats. We report that both measurement formats are able to extract the expected threefold affect structure from a ten affect word battery. The slider format is, however, modestly more reliable, and more efficient in time to complete, has the ability to limit missing data, and generates continuous data that is less truncated than data derived from the radio button format. Finally, we report on three tests of construct validity. Both approaches exhibit equivalent results on two of those tests. However, the radio button format does poorly on one test of construct validity, that on the anticipated relationship between anxiety and interest in novel information. We present an assessment of two methods for measuring emotional reactions to stimuli such as political issues, political figures, or events. Both methods are suitable for use in online surveys or computer-driven experiments. The traditional method utilizes labeled “radio buttons” that enable a participant in a study to select by clicking on one of an array of typically five response options, ranging from lower to higher of some identified affect term (e.g., how angry one might feel). Second, the slider method offers a participant the ability to move an “arrow” up or down to indicate how much (up) or little (down) they feel. The goal of both measures is to ascertain the level of a targeted emotion, i.e., how little or how much, say anger. The slider method has been specifically developed to be used with participants using a computer. The slider approach falls within the category of visual analog scales. This method for measuring affective responses to stimuli of whatever sort has not hitherto been examined to determine its reliability and validity. The literature on the reliability and validity of these measurement strategies is thin and we found no studies including an explicit comparison.
14 - The Impact of the New Media
- Edited by W. Lance Bennett, University of Washington, Robert M. Entman, North Carolina State University
-
- Book:
- Mediated Politics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2012
- Print publication:
- 20 November 2000, pp 299-320
-
- Chapter
- Export citation
-
Summary
Everybody has a hypothesis about the impact of the new media. According to recent reports the new media have variously initiated or reinforced trends that have
Weakened political party systems
Offered a new platform for hate speech
Stimulated a new capacity for grassroots democracy
Permitted the third world to leapfrog painful stages of industrialization into an information economy
Robbed children of their childhood and everybody of their sense of place
Sped up the process of government responses to international crises precluding appropriate deliberation
Isolated family members from each other
Permanently stabilized the business cycle
Exacerbated gaps between information haves and have-nots
Limited the capacity of authoritarian regimes to control the flow of information within and outside of their realm
Readers will recognize many of these as preowned hypotheses, most not particularly low mileage at that. Much of the evidence of such effects is derived from the selective accumulation of anecdotes. Systematic empirical research struggles for methodologies capable of distinguishing the causal impact of new technologies from other historical trends and cycles. Further, the most radical new technologies such as the Internet are still at early stages of diffusion, challenging the analyst to distinguish the characteristics of early adopters and of early implementations from the underlying character of the technology.
I would argue that the academic community should acknowledge and encourage the journalistic battle of anecdotes. Although the question of whether the Internet will turn us into a nation of porno addicts or political know-nothings might seem less than optimally framed for designing research, it reflects the characteristic style of popular journalism and general public concern.