Question Wording

By that I mean general questions asking if they active in politics, they might be embarrassed or have different perceptions on what it means to be active in politics. If we can have a more specific question on whether they have participated in some these actions, it will be easier to get an accurate answer.

Marie you bring a up a good point, the general question you talk about should be our first question, as this will give us a good indicator if our respondents are politically involved at all.

In order to make a well-founded assessment of this research question, it would be safe to analyze a ten[ish]-year period. Since media has evolved exponentially in the last ten years, this would give us a clear view of the situation. In order to do so, however, we would need to target some people that have been eligible to vote within the last ten years. By doing so, we could try to correlate an increase in the levels of media coverage from (given that part of my hypothesis is that media coverage increases as we near the present era, due to an increase in popularity and number of social media outlets [i.e. Facebook and Twitter]) and see if there is also an increase in the voter turnout/political participation. This would allow us to assess our research question and would allow us to display and organize our information in a nice time-series graph. Assuming that we are measuring the voter turnout in the last few BC elections, here is a question that we could potentially use.

A) Did you vote in any of the following BC elections? Check all those that apply. 1. 1997 2. 2001 3. 2005 4. 2009

And then we could also ask the questions on media coverage/sources within the same context… For example:

B) How do you get your news? C) Has there been an increase in the availability of the news (on cable or on the internet) within the last decade? D) Are you more aware of political issues than you were in the past? E) Does that push you towards or away from participating in politics?

I really like the idea of asking about which elections people voted in. Wording-wise I would put it something more like:

Which of the following BC elections have you voted in? a. 1997 b.2001 c.2005 d.2009 e. None of the above

I think giving the option of 'none of the above' is a good idea since it would separate people who choose not to answer and people who haven't voted.

I also like the idea about asking which elections the people have voted in, but it may be difficult to ask each year. Some people may not remember specifically, or were not eligible to vote at that time. I also like the idea of the prefer not to answer that Jen has mentioned. Maybe a question along the lines of

"In the years you have been eligible to vote how many Provincial elections have you voted in 1. All of them 2. More than half 3. Less than half 4. None 5. Prefer not to answer"

I'll add it to the main page, feel free to edit

But i guess the problem with that wording would be that we couldn't measure which election was higher. Will edit it back to a. 1997 b.2001 c.2005 d.2009 e. None of the above d. Prefer not to answer.

I like Jennifer's idea to give participants the option "none of the above" because if we choose to instead allow them to have the choice of not answering at all it could effect how valid our results may be. In order to accurately measure the influence of media on political participation we should also examine the different forms of media which were available then ('97) in comparison to the ones available now. So maybe instead of Has there been an increase in the availability of the news we can ask "Has the availability of new forms of media (Facebook, Twitter) effected your level of political participation?" or "Do you feel new forms of media have influenced you to engage more in the electoral process?"

I also agree with Chris that since we are looking at a certain time frame to support our hypothesis we do need to target people who were eligible to vote since '97 to clarify that their lack of participation was not due to age restrictions.

I think we should exam people's behaviour of political participation and envolvement in media at the same period of time. There might be cases that people who read and watch more political news less than before but participated in the last election. So when we propose the question examining the political participation, we'd better just look at the most recent one. While for question with regard to the exposure to the media, I think people are tend to answer according to their most recent experience.