Democratic Reflection: Evaluating Real-Time Citizen Responses to Media Content
What has always impressed me about this next method for ‘The Person in the (Big) Data‘ series is the way in which research participants were able to develop their own ideals for democratic citizenship that are then used to evaluate politicians. Giles Moss discusses the evolution of the app through its various iterations and highlights the value of the data developed out of its application for further research. This grounded, value-driven application is an inspiration for people-centred research and we look forward from more of the same from Giles and the team he worked with on this!
Democratic Reflection is a web app that measures the real-time responses of audiences to media content. The app was developed by a team of researchers from the Open University and the University of Leeds in the UK, as part of a research project funded by the EPSRC, to explore how citizens respond to and evaluate televised election debates (Coleman, Buckingham Shum, De Liddo, Moss, Plüss & Wilson 2014).[1] Accessing the web app via a second screen, research participants are asked to watch live television programming and use the app to evaluate the programme by selecting from a range of twenty predefined statements. The statements are designed to capture key capabilities of democratic citizenship, allowing us to analyse how viewers evaluate media content in relation to their needs as democratic citizens rather than just media consumers. In this post, I describe how we developed Democratic Reflection and what we hope to learn from the data the app generates.
Of course, we’re not the first researchers to develop a technology to measure real-time audience responses to media content. As far back as the 1930s, Paul Lazerfield and Frank Stanton developed an instrument called the Lazarsfeld-Stanton Program Analyzer, where research participants could indicate whether they liked or disliked media content and their inputs would be recorded in real time (Levy 1982). More sophisticated variants of the Program Analyzer followed. The Ontorio Educational Communication Authority and Children’s Television Workshop created a ‘Program Evaluation Analysis Computer’, which had sixteen buttons with labels that could be altered to include new measures, and the RD Percy Company of Seattle developed VOXBOX, which allowed viewers to respond to content by indicating whether they thought it was ‘Funny’, ‘Unbelievable’, and so on (Levy 1982: 36-37). More recently, Boydstun, Glazier, Pietryka, & Resnik (2014) developed a mobile app to capture real-time responses of citizens to the first US presidential debate in 2012, offering viewers four responses: ‘Agree’, ‘Disagree’, ‘Spin’, and ‘Dodge’.
Democratic Reflection fits into this tradition of real-time response to media content, but it focuses on analysing how viewers evaluate televised election debates in terms of their communicative needs as democratic citizens. In other words, we designed the app not just to explore whether people liked or disliked what they were watching or agreed or disagreed with it, but how media content related to their more fundamental capabilities as democratic citizens. Our first task, therefore, was to identify the democratic capabilities that media content and more specifically televised election debates could affect. Read More… Democratic Reflection: Evaluating Real-Time Citizen Responses to Media Content
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