My Experience this Semester

            Throughout the semester we have learned a variety of topics, relevant to both Political Science and Communication majors. Some of the most interesting topics to me were framing, confirmation bias, and narratives. Of these topics, the most important in the field of political science is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias refers to the tendency of people, subconsciously or purposefully, to pursue information that supports their beliefs. News outlets can manipulate people in this manner by writing stories in certain ways as to fulfil the biases held by their readers. When conducting an experiment, confirmation bias can also skew the results if you do not have impartial researchers. A researcher who falls into following their bias rather than the data presented may ruin the results of a study overall. More particular to Communication majors are the topics of narratives and framing. Framing details the structures that writers use to portray information in certain ways. In this class we learned about four particular frames: horserace, conflict, issues, and attributes. In the context of the election season; stories that make the race out to be a comparison of numbers such as delegate counts or approval polls would constitute a horserace. A conflict frame writes in the context of a personal battle between two or more candidates; one candidate calling another out individually over a policy or event would constitute this frame. Issues frames detail the candidates’ positions on different important issues within the race, such as abortion, immigration, and the War on Terror. The attributes frame details the characteristics of a particular candidate, relaying information such as how a candidates’ past influences their current behavior.

John Kasich at Kennesaw State University

            As a practical application of the skills we learned in class, we conducted a variety of group and individual exercises. Individually, we were responsible for writing weekly blog posts that displayed our knowledge and application of the week’s topics. As groups we conducted field research and wrote a content analysis, three news stories, and a field research project. Our first content analysis had our groups interact with and determine the differences of the campaign websites of two candidates. Our group conducted their research on Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton. My task was to analyze Clinton’s webpage, focusing particularly on the language and ease of use of the site. Overall, we were looking for the differences of the two candidates’ stances on immigration. Our next major area of the class was conducting field research at various campaign events to gather information to write two news stories and a research paper. Unfortunately, I was unable to make it to the first campaign event and so didn’t have much to contribute to the first news story. The second news story revolved around the visit to Kennesaw State University by John Kasich. I was able to take some pictures of the event to send to my groupmates. Our research paper focused on the two underdogs of the race at that point, Kasich and Sanders. For the paper, I wrote on the reasons that there may a disconnect between rally attendance and voter presence. For the last news story, we had to describe the current standing in the presidential race. For my part, I gathered the then-current delegate numbers and compiled them into a graphic. The last group assignment was another content analysis, this time focusing on two different news sources. We chose to contrast CNN and Fox News. We had to tally the different writing frames used in 25 stories from each source. I was responsible for collecting the stories from CNN and writing an analysis of my collected data.

            In terms of the learning objectives of this class, I believe they more slightly more heavily weighted in favor of the communications/journalism majors. I believe that the research projects were a good refresher on how to perform both qualitative and quantitative research. Also, I think that I learned about how to pick out the techniques that are commonly used in political communication. Other than research procedure, I believe this will be one of the more applicable skills outside of this class. However, I do not think that I can say that I accomplished the goals of producing high quality journalism on American elections and accurately describing perspectives on political communication and elections. The format of our group work allowed us to defer to others in our group that were more capable in certain areas. This often led to the Political Science majors gathering and analyzing the data, and the Journalism majors writing the news stories. Rather than saying that I accomplished the stated goals, I would rather say that the class better helped me learn how to delegate diverging tasks and make a cohesive result.