Elyse Sherr
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
Research Mentor(s): Joshua Pasek, Associate Professor
Research Mentor School/College/Department: Communication and Media, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts
Presentation Date: Thursday, April 22, 2021
Session: Session 3 (1pm-1:50pm)
Breakout Room: Room 5
Presenter: 3
Abstract
The 2020 release of a story linking Hunter Biden, the son of then Presidential candidate Joe Biden, to corrupt business deals with Ukraine by the New York Post brought copious media attention to the Biden family. This study seeks to capture the sentiment of survey respondents between Hunter Biden and belief in a New York Post story. Despite the proliferation of textual survey analysis, the use of auditory data in survey collection is a relatively unexplored field. Further, we hypothesize that audio data provides a unique opportunity to detect belief among populations better than textual data. Using both the audio and textual responses from 1,000 survey respondents answering the open-ended question of “what, if anything, have you heard about Donald Trump and Joe Biden,” we can code for sentiment analysis: to detect sarcasm, irony, and tone to construct a clearer picture of actual opinion. The results showed a small effect in the difference of sentiment coded between the textual and oral responses. Through an analysis of the opinions, the survey respondents typically believed that the story had incriminated Joe Biden. These results suggest that the attitudes of survey respondents are accurately depicted through the textual-based responses.
Authors: Elyse Sherr
Research Method: Survey Research
