Expression Of Opinion Research Articles

Gender and Public Issues Deliberations in Named and Anonymous Online Environments

Online deliberations in social studies classrooms are increasingly feasible as more schools incorporate online learning environments into their programs. The present study investigates student participation in online deliberations with particular attention to (1) the differences between opinion expression and participation in anonymous versus named conditions, (2) whether the magnitude of any such differences varies by gender, (3) whether males and females express a preference for deliberation in named or anonymous online environments, and (4) the impact of named and anonymous environments on developing students’ deliberative skills. When opinion expression and participation results are analyzed by gender, we find that differences between females and males that manifest in named conditions disappear when discussing anonymously. We find that female students are significantly more likely to prefer discussing in anonymous environments. Finally, we find that students deliberating anonymously express more opinions in a subsequent deliberation than those in the named condition.

Anthropology is the science of the sense of humour

This article is a reprint of Malinowski, Bronislaw. 1937. “Introduction.” In The savage hits back, or the white man through native eyes , by Julius E. Lips, vii–ix. London: Lovat Dickinson.

Silencing Political Opinions: An Assessment of the Influence of Geopolitical Contexts in Colombia

One of the most understudied aspects of the spiral of silence theory is the influence on opinion expression of different social structures anchored in geopolitical units, such as cities or states. This study evaluates political opinion expression after an election by relying on national survey data collected in Colombia (Latin America) and using multilevel analytic techniques to assess geopolitical and individual contexts of influence. Results provide evidence that a disagreeable national context—an election outcome contrary to one’s preference—matters in explaining citizens’ political expression. In addition, individual-level variables in the form of self-censorship were studied. Rather than an individual’s level of self-censorship contributing to expression inhibition, it appears that aggregate city levels of self-censorship affect the likelihood of an individual expressing his or her opinion after a presidential election.

Psychological antecedents and motivational models of collective action: examining the role of perceived effectiveness in political protest participation

The present study examines Hong Kong citizens’ willingness to participate in the Occupy Central/Umbrella Movement. A representative adult survey (N = 816) was conducted before the Occupy Central protest in 2014. Regression analyses showed that the core psychological antecedents of political identity (psychological attachment to pro-democracy parties and Occupy activists), political efficacy (perceived effectiveness of individual and movement agency), ideology (dissatisfaction with the pace of democratization), and emotion (anger with the political environment) were significant predictors of likely participation. Measures of perceived effectiveness of the Occupy movement to achieve successful outcomes (i.e. its ability to influence public opinion, strengthen the pro-democracy cause in Hong Kong, and facilitate opinion expression) explained additional variance even after controlling for demographics and the core antecedents. An integrated motivational model of collective action was then tested using structural equation modeling. Findings are consistent with the extant literature. Moral convictions (democracy as a fundamental human value) served as an antecedent of identity, efficacy, ideology, and anger, while identity exhibited direct and indirect effects on participation through efficacy, ideology and anger. The model also pointed to a role for perceived effectiveness, supporting the idea that individuals are motivated by other potential outcomes of a protest beyond achieving its primary objective.

The rise of the dragon? Framing China’s global leadership in elite American newspapers

The current study analyzes the framing of China’s emergence as a global power in the opinion pages of two elite newspapers. The study expands upon previous studies examining newspaper opinion gatekeepers’ use of the editorial and opposite-editorial pages as salient platforms for the expression of diverse opinion regarding foreign affairs. Results show that the New York Times framed China as a global power undermined by structural limitations, while The Wall Street Journal framed China as a direct threat to US foreign policy interests. The results of the analysis are discussed in the context of media-government power dynamics.

Discursive violence and responsibility

This article discusses the discursive strategies of the Freedom Party (PVV), a contemporary Dutch populist and Islamophobic party. After tracing its ideological roots to mainstream liberalism rather than earlier forms of extreme right political movements, I will discuss its discourse about Muslims. It will appear that this discourse goes far beyond the legitimate expression of opinion. Using some of Judith Butler’s ideas about the performativity of hate speech, I will attempt to describe how PVV leader Geert Wilders’s language is not only a discourseaboutviolence, but is also itself a discourseofviolence. Simultaneously, however, Wilders systematically denied responsibility for any violence his words might contain, imply, or provoke; instead, he and his sympathizers blamed both Muslims and his political opponents for whatever violence might occur in the wake of his utterances. This appears most clearly in the discussion following Norwegian Anders Breivik’s murderous 2011 assault on the Utøya island, an act which he himself claimed was in part inspired by Wilders’s political rhetoric.

A Study of Law-Based Chinese Petition System From the Perspective of Evolutionary Game Model

Petition system (named Xinfang in Chinese) is a typical Chinese system for citizens to express opinions and seek non-lawsuit remedies. It was originally positioned with the emphasis on expression of public opinions, but the general public expect more on its rights relief function. Over the recent 30 years, China’s economy entered into a period of high-speed development, and the redressal of social interest structure aggregated the conflicts of functional position of petition, which has surged the volume of petition letters and visits. The frequent occurrence of social contradictions resulting from blockage of petitions has seriously impaired social stability. Hence, it is pressing to readjust the functional position of petition and guide the system onto the legal track. In this paper, theoretical analysis is made over the strategy selection and dynamic game of both players of petition during the interaction process by building an evolutionary game model, to conclude an ideal state of stable equilibrium. With the theory base, suggestions are proposed on guiding petition onto the legal track.

Analysing the Unequal Effects of Positive and Negative Information on the Behaviour of Users of a Taiwanese On-Line Bulletin Board.

The impact of social influence causes people to adopt the behaviour of others when interacting with other individuals. The effects of social influence can be direct or indirect. Direct social influence is the result of an individual directly influencing the opinion of another, while indirect social influence is a process taking place when an individual’s opinion and behaviour is affected by the availability of information about others’ actions. Such indirect effect may exhibit a more significant impact in the on-line community because the internet records not only positive but also negative information, for example on-line written text comments. This study focuses on indirect social influence and examines the effect of preceding information on subsequent users’ opinions by fitting statistical models to data collected from an on-line bulletin board. Specifically, the different impacts of information on approval and disapproval comments on subsequent opinions were investigated. Although in an anonymous situation where social influence is assumed to be at minimum, our results demonstrate the tendency of on-line users to adopt both positive and negative information to conform to the neighbouring trend when expressing opinions. Moreover, our results suggest unequal effects of the local approval and disapproval comments in affecting the likelihood of expressing opinions. The impact of neighbouring disapproval densities was stronger than that of neighbouring approval densities on inducing subsequent disapproval relative to approval comments. However, our results suggest no effects of global social influence on subsequent opinion expression.

Disinterest, vocation and elections: two late seventeenth-century affairs

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, two disputed elections, which were contested by Jansenists and Jesuits, shook the religious establishment at Louvain. Somewhat banal at first sight, these elections actually brought to light the principles and issues at stake in operating the electoral process under the ancien régime . This did not involve choosing the best candidates among those competing for office, nor the democratic expression of opinions held by the members of the collectivity or corporation called upon to render a verdict. Rather than representing a right to be freely exercised, voting—for a monastic superior, dean, bishop or rector—was instead an honour, a privilege that entailed numerous obligations. As a result, early modern elections contributed far more to the reproduction of corporate society and its specific institutions than to the long march of the modern democratic experience.

Social Media and Offline Political Participation: Uncovering the Paths From Digital to Physical

Numerous studies have examined the uses of social media for citizen engagement, concluding that they act as effective platforms for developing civic skills, promoting bridging social ties, engaging in political discussions, mobilizing the electorate, and organizing offline political activities (Macafee & De Simone, 2012; Skoric & Poor, 2013; Valenzuela, Park, & Kee, 2009; Vitak et al., 2011). Still, scholars have cautioned against concluding that all social media uses promote political participation, as research has shown that the relationships vary across different types of social media platforms and patterns of use (Gil de Zúñiga, Bachmann, Hsu, & Brundidge, 2013; Gil de Zúñiga, Jung, & Valenzuela, 2012; Pasek, More, & Romer, 2009). Today, social media use consists of heterogeneous practices, ranging from passive consumption to active opinion expression and even occasional deliberation. People use social media to look for information, seek solace and vent dissatisfactions, express opinions, engage in social conversations, and discuss issues of the day. Different structural designs and technological features of these platforms attract diverse types of people, encourage different communicative practices, and promote the creation of distinct types of networks ( Zhang & Wang, 2010 ). In this study, we separate social media into two categories, depending on user motivations, technological affordances and network structure, and dominant communicative practices: (a) egocentric social media, characterized by individual user profiles and (semi-)public displays of social connections (e.g., social network sites [SNS] such as Facebook, microblogs such as Twitter), and also including platforms for personal expression like blogs; and (b) interest-oriented social media designed to promote interest- or topic-based discussions among users (e.g., online forums).

Governing by the people: the example of California’s propositions (1990-2012)

American state Constitutions provide for direct democracy in which citizens are given the tools to impact their government. The most common way is via the proposition which can change the state law. This paper focuses on two controversial sets of propositions from California in the recent past: medical and recreational marijuana, and same-sex marriage. It questions the different powers at play such as money, special interests, and the potential institutional checks. Are propositions the expression of public opinion? How effective are these examples of direct democracy?

Effects of Perceived Media Diversity and Media Reliance on Public Opinion Expression

Effects of Perceived Media Diversity and Media Reliance on Public Opinion Expression

Far from reach but near at hand: The role of social media for cross-national mobilization

This study investigates the role of social media in contributing to participatory democracy in a cross-national context. By examining the Sunflower social movement in Taiwan and targeting a particular subgroup—Taiwanese citizens abroad—this study assesses factors that influence citizens abroad to engage in social media use for social movements as well as how different activities on social media contribute to political participation. The findings show that individual’s personal attitude and civic attitude exert a positive influence on political participation through opinion expression and activism on social media. Similarly, negative emotions toward the government’s handling of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement (CSSTA) also promote political participation through expressing opinion and joining movement-related groups on social media. The paths signify the importance of attitude, emotion, and active use of social media for social movement in cross-national mobilization.

The consequences of social intolerance on non-violent protest

This paper scrutinizes the impact of intolerance toward diverse ethnic, religious, and cultural groups on an individual’s willingness to actively engage in non-violent protest. Following new insights, we examine the individual as well as the ecological effect of social intolerance on protest behavior. Drawing from insights of social psychology and communication science, we expect that the prevalence of intolerance reinforces the positive effect of individual-level intolerance on protest participation. From a rational choice perspective, however, a negative moderating effect is expected, as the expression of opinions becomes redundant for intolerant individuals in an intolerant society. We base our multilevel analyses on data from theWorld Values Surveyscovering 32 established democracies. Our results reveal that intolerance leads to more non-violent protest participation. This relationship, however, is strongly influenced by the prevalence of intolerance in a country.

A Journalistic Corpus: A Methodology for the Analysis of the Financial Crisis in Spain

In this paper, we propose a methodological approach to the linguistic study of a journalistic corpus. It analyzes the monitoring of the financial crisis in Spain in 2012 by two of the most important Spanish newspapers. The paper describes ongoing research into expressions of opinion in the discourse of the news about the financial crisis in Spain. In other words, this corpus-driven study investigates the expression of opinions through language in order to develop a semantic analysis of newspaper discourse. The methodological approach involves both quantitative and qualitative analysis. The investigation focuses on the analysis of the language used to present and evaluate the events related to the financial crisis as a prelude to unmask the ideologies implicit in texts.

Jointly identifying opinion mining elements and fuzzy measurement of opinion intensity to analyze product features

Opinion mining mainly involves three elements: feature and feature-of relations, opinion expressions and the related opinion attributes (e.g. Polarity), and feature–opinion relations. Although many works have emerged to achieve its aim of gaining information, the previous researches typically handled each of the three elements in isolation, which cannot give sufficient information extraction results; hence, the complexity and the running time of information extraction is increased. In this paper, we propose an opinion mining extraction algorithm to jointly discover the main opinion mining elements. Specifically, the algorithm automatically builds kernels to combine closely related words into new terms from word level to phrase level based on dependency relations; and we ensure the accuracy of opinion expressions and polarity based on: fuzzy measurements, opinion degree intensifiers, and opinion patterns. The 3458 analyzed reviews show that the proposed algorithm can effectively identify the main elements simultaneously and outperform the baseline methods. The proposed algorithm is used to analyze the features among heterogeneous products in the same category. The feature-by-feature comparison can help to select the weaker features and recommend the correct specifications from the beginning life of a product. From this comparison, some interesting observations are revealed. For example, the negative polarity of video dimension is higher than the product usability dimension for a product. Yet, enhancing the dimension of product usability can more effectively improve the product.

Generic Medication In Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain Patients: An Issue of Representations, Trust, and Experience

Chronic pain patients are frequently confronted with the issue of the prescription and/or substitution of original formulations with generic medications. Information regarding generic substitution is not univocal and room for the expression of contradictory opinions is ample. Along with an ever stronger advocacy for the use of generics, various sources of information report concerns regarding substitution. Semistructured interviews explored patients’ representations (N = 25) regarding generics in patients suffering from chronic musculoskeletal pain. Patients’ interviews were transcribed and submitted to content analysis. Patients’ representations suggest that they might be confident in taking a generic medication: when a) he/she has an understanding of generics as resulting from the loss of original trading license; b) the generic medication is prescribed by the physician (supported by the pharmacist); c) each prescription is discussed, that is, the patient is prescribed the generic version of a given medication and not a generic medication; and d) the prescription is individualized. Information and trust are central considerations; the concept of “copy” was frequently mentioned to define generics, from an identical to a forged medication. Using a copy might not be questioned when the medications are perceived as being identical and efficient; however, it might become a problem in cases in which the copy indicates that the patient thinks he/she is receiving a second-choice medication. Our results provide support for generic medication raising many concerns and much lesser perceived need. For patients, economic arguments per se are not sufficient to justify substitution, and may even raise issues calling upon cognitive dissonance. In this context, positive cues require further attention and negative cues need be de-emphasized - in particular lower price as an indication of lower quality, and generic status as contradictory with advocating individualization of medication.

Communicative effects of mira ‘look’ and a ver ‘let’s see’ in oral argumentative discourse

This paper analyzes the communicative effects of the discourse markers mira ‘look’ and a ver ‘let’s see’ in two subgenres of oral argumentative discourse, viz. tertulia and debate, where the expression of a proper opinion and the formulation of arguments is often accompanied and reinforced by appellative markers, such as the ones we study. Although in the literature both markers are classified as ‘focus markers of alterity’ (Martín Zorraquino and Portolés Lázaro 1999, 4171–4190), corpus analysis shows how they both activate different communicative functions and strategies to appeal to the hearer. Instead of focusing on their resemblance, we will argue how these differences, which we will formulate in terms of communicative divergence versus convergence, tie in with the conceptual meaning structure of mirar ‘to look’ and ver ‘to see’ and the proper perspective attached to each of them.

Associations Between Exposure to and Expression of Negative Opinions About Human Papillomavirus Vaccines on Social Media: An Observational Study.

BackgroundGroups and individuals that seek to negatively influence public opinion about the safety and value of vaccination are active in online and social media and may influence decision making within some communities.ObjectiveWe sought to measure whether exposure to negative opinions about human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines in Twitter communities is associated with the subsequent expression of negative opinions by explicitly measuring potential information exposure over the social structure of Twitter communities.MethodsWe hypothesized that prior exposure to opinions rejecting the safety or value of HPV vaccines would be associated with an increased risk of posting similar opinions and tested this hypothesis by analyzing temporal sequences of messages posted on Twitter (tweets). The study design was a retrospective analysis of tweets related to HPV vaccines and the social connections between users. Between October 2013 and April 2014, we collected 83,551 English-language tweets that included terms related to HPV vaccines and the 957,865 social connections among 30,621 users posting or reposting the tweets. Tweets were classified as expressing negative or neutral/positive opinions using a machine learning classifier previously trained on a manually labeled sample.ResultsDuring the 6-month period, 25.13% (20,994/83,551) of tweets were classified as negative; among the 30,621 users that tweeted about HPV vaccines, 9046 (29.54%) were exposed to a majority of negative tweets. The likelihood of a user posting a negative tweet after exposure to a majority of negative opinions was 37.78% (2780/7361) compared to 10.92% (1234/11,296) for users who were exposed to a majority of positive and neutral tweets corresponding to a relative risk of 3.46 (95% CI 3.25-3.67, P<.001).ConclusionsThe heterogeneous community structure on Twitter appears to skew the information to which users are exposed in relation to HPV vaccines. We found that among users that tweeted about HPV vaccines, those who were more often exposed to negative opinions were more likely to subsequently post negative opinions. Although this research may be useful for identifying individuals and groups currently at risk of disproportionate exposure to misinformation about HPV vaccines, there is a clear need for studies capable of determining the factors that affect the formation and adoption of beliefs about public health interventions.

Understanding Engagement and Willingness to Speak Up in Social-Television: A Full-Season, Cross-Genre Analysis of TV Audience Participation on Twitter

The practice of watching TV while using a secondary device is becoming a widespread social phenomenon. At the same time, a growing amount of studies, focus on users’ communicative behaviors while consuming specific TV programs or genres. Despite a diffuse scholarly interest on this issue, few studies compare different forms of online audience participation generated around different TV genres. This paper presents a full-season comparative study of live tweeting practices generated around a political talk show and a talent show. We focused on the following research questions: RQ1. What triggers active audience engagement in the two formats? RQ2. Do people tend to delegate or cover up the expression of opinion when the show deals with politics rather than entertainment? To answer these questions, from August 30 2012 to June 30 2013, we collected all tweets containing either the official hashtag of the political talk show Servizio Pubblico or the sixth Italian edition of X-Factor for a total amount of about 1 million tweets. For each episode (37), we identified peaks of Twitter engagement and observed the corresponding TV scene. We found that surprise and suspense play a different role in enacting online audience engagement. Further content analysis on a sample of eight peaks (13,189 coded tweets) confirmed the substantial difference in the way opinions are expressed when commenting on politics and entertainment.