Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships, Social Media and Agenda-setting for Intimate Partner Violence in the US and China: A

Transcription

1 Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowships, 206 Social Media and Agenda-setting for Intimate Partner Violence in the US and China: A Comparison between Twitter and Weibo Jia Xue PhD candidate School of Social Policy & Practice Dual Master in Statistics Wharton School Mailing Address: 385 Walnut Street Philadelphia, PA, 90 xuejia@sp2.upenn.edu Advisor: Richard Gelles, PhD The Joanne and Raymond Welsh Chair of Child Welfare and Family Violence School of Social Policy & Practice

2 Background Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) is a longstanding, prevalent, and persistent social problem across societies and cultures. IPV, occurring in various forms (i.e., physical, psychological, and sexual violence), is the most common form of violence against women. The World Health Organization reports that about one third of women experience IPV worldwide (WHO, 206). IPV is now recognized as a significant social problem in the United States. However, prior to 970s there was not even a term to describe the problem of violence toward women in intimate relationships and no estimates on the extent of the phenomenon (Gelles & Straus, 988). Prior to the 970s, IPV was essentially a private trouble. The Women s Movement of the late 960s through the 970s identified the issue violence toward women and led the nation to awareness of wife beating as a social problem (Pleck, 987; Schecter, 982; Tierney, 982; Morgan, Nackerud & Yegidis, 998). The Women s Movement helped pave the way for legislation, laws, and policies to address IPV (Hempel, 996). Moreover, the impact of research on family violence informed the public and policymakers that IPV is significant social problem. Scholars reported on the prevalence, theories, and the causes of family violence. Feminist scholars examined the effects of policy interventions, such as funding for shelters and mandatory arrest policies. Increasing recognition of IPV as a social problem was critical to securing the attention of policymakers and led to the enactment and implementation the first comprehensive federal legislation in the U.S. in 99 Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) to address violence in intimate relationships (Pub. L. #03-322). IPV is now recognized as a significant social problem in the United States. In China, policy making regarding IPV lags far behind the US (ADVN, 200). When the U.S. Congress passed the VAWA in 99, IPV had not yet been recognized as a social problem that needed attention from the government and policy makers in China (Wang, 200 in Tao et al., 200). Gender-biased legal decisions are commonly made by the family court in solving family dispute issues. The fourth UN World Conference on Women of 995 in Beijing finally identified IPV as a violation of women s democratic rights in China. The Beijing Platform for Action proposed gender balance and provided assistance to develop a policy agenda regarding domestic violence. Moreover, social activists, journalists, and feminists began to write articles in Chinese newspapers, weekly magazines, and academic journals about the issue of IPV. The publications examined IPV from the perspectives of law, gender awareness, women s rights, and democracy. A decade-long effort by lawyers, activists, media, and researchers was critical to motivate policymakers to enact the first nationwide law prohibiting family violence in December 205. Various mechanisms influence how government officials make decisions to establish policy agendas regarding one type social problem rather than another. The mechanisms include focusing events, women s representation in elections, women political leaders, social science data, women s civil society organizations, and mass media (Cook et. al., 983). The global popularity of social media led scholars to investigate the role social media can play in influencing policymaking process. Social media provide many platforms for expressing public opinion on political issues. For instance, Twitter and Weibo are mechanism for live broadcasting to disseminate breaking news (Kwak et al., 200). In addition, social media influence news coverage by traditional mass media (Phuvipadawat & Murata, 200; Wright & Hinson, 2008). 2

3 Moreover, social media play a profound role as a platform for political commentary (Chen, Zhang & Wilson, 203), promote civic engagement (Khamis and Vaughan, 20), reshape politics (Small, 20), and are key participants in political contention (Poell, Kloet & Zeng, 20). Scholarship shows that the number of times a party or candidate is mentioned in Twitter messages is highly correlated with the success of that party or election results (Tumasjan, Sprenger, Sandner & Welpe, 200). Moreover, the extensive use of social media was tied to the success of Barak Obama s presidential campaign in 2008 (Jaeger, Paquette & Simmons, 200). Research Goals Existing literature illustrates how social media impacts policymaking and the democratic process (Meraz, 2009; Loader & Mercea, 20). The present study aims to focus on the impact of social media in the decision making and policy making process regarding the problem of IPV in the US and China. The main research question is: How social media reveal the agenda-setting and policymaking of IPV in the US and China? I use the theoretical framework of agenda setting (Kingdon, 98) to conceptualize the research question. The examination of social media focuses on two social media platforms: the micro-blogging service Twitter in the US (since 2006) and Weibo of China (since 2009). These two micro-blogging sites are the leading platforms of social media with millions of registered users and quantifiable and accessible research data. Significance Legislative efforts for addressing IPV in China lag far behind the U.S. This study compares the social transformation of IPV and shed a comparative light on the impact of the social media in the policymaking process in US and China. The study is methodologically innovative by utilizing big data and applying computer programming skills for data collection. The study is unique by applying agenda-setting to the role of social media in policymaking of IPV. The study has implications for future studies and policy makers for whether social media can speed up and enhance the agenda-setting process. Since social media can reach out to larger audiences, the study hypothesizes that China might be able to catch up the U.S. in terms of IPV policy making. Methodology This cross-sectional study is an exploratory content analysis of the contents on Twitter and Weibo. The study will collect all publicly available tweets and Weibo messages that mention the defined hashtags, such as #IPV, #rape, #DV, and #VAW. The study will use the hashtags as search terms for collecting tweets. The collected tweets will be screened to exclude tweets that are not written in English or Chinese, and do not contain IPV-relevant contents. The study will use Application Programming Interface, software R to collect data. Data will be exported in the.csv format for analysis. Data features include users tweet contents, user s profile (e.g., location, number of followers, number of followings). Data will be analyzed using the method of content analyses including quantifying qualitative aspects of the texts (counted and summarized) and qualitative inductive analyses that also allow researchers to make replicable and valid inferences from texts (Krippendorf, 200). The methodology is consistent with previous studies in agenda-setting research (Ader, 995; Wanta, Golan & Lee, 200) as well as recent web-based research (Anderson & Kanuka, 2003, p. 7) and Twitter-based analysis (Rui, Chen, & Damiano, 203). I have developed a coding protocol to provide guidelines for coding tweet contents. This protocol follows Kingdon s model and involves three main themes as problem recognition, policy formation, and politics. These 3

4 themes and their subcategories will be used to code and analyze all tweet contents in the study. A pilot study will test the coding protocol in a sample of tweets (n=00 for each dataset) and test for the inter-coder reliability between two independent coders. The units of analysis will be each individual post on Twitter or Weibo. After achieving a kappa coefficient of 0.75 or higher score, two coders will refine the coding manual and send to the committee for an assessment before proceeding with further coding. Then, each coder will be randomly and evenly distributed the full dataset and code tweets for analysis. Why funding is being sought While my home department does not allocate funding for dissertation data collection and conference travel (5 th year student), the financial support of $,000 will be used to support expenses for data collection and conference travels. First, I am seeking funding to purchase - months of data from social media as datasets in the dissertation. Second, given that I am on the job market, I will present my study findings in upcoming influential international conferences: the International Family Violence and Child Victimization Research Conference (IFVCV), in Durham, NH and the International Conference on Computational Social Science (ICCSS), in Chicago, IL. I list detailed items with expenses as follows: Budget and budget justification Items Cost per Unit Number of Units Estimated Expense Data Collection Twitter Weibo Conference travel IFVCV conference Registration Hotel Transportation ICCSS conference Registration Hotel Transportation $250 $250 $295 $00 $305 months months $000 $000 $295 $00 $305 $0 $28 $38 $0 $52 $38 Total: $000 Reference: Ader, C. R. (995). A longitudinal study of agenda setting for the issue of environmental pollution. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 72(2), ADVN (Anti-domestic violence network), 200. Retrieved from Anderson, T., & Kanuka, H. (2003). E-research: Methods, strategies, and issues. Chen, L., Zhang, C., & Wilson, C. (203). Tweeting under pressure: analyzing trending topics and evolving word choice on sina weibo. In Proceedings of the first ACM conference on Online social networks ). ACM. Cook, F. L., Tyler, T. R., Goetz, E. G., Gordon, M. T., Protess, D., Leff, D. R., & Molotch, H. L. (983). Media and agenda setting: Effects on the public, interest group leaders, policy makers, and policy. Public Opinion Quarterly, 7(), 6-35.

5 Gelles, R. J., & Straus, M. A. (988). Intimate violence: The definitive study of the causes and consequences of abuse in the American family. New York: Simon & Schuster. Hempel, M. (996). Reproductive health and rights: origins of and challenges to the ICPD agenda. Health Transition Review, 6(), Jaeger, P. T., Paquette, S., & Simmons, S. N. (200). Information policy in national political campaigns: A comparison of the 2008 campaigns for President of the United States and Prime Minister of Canada. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 7(), Khamis, S., & Vaughn, K. (20). Cyberactivism in the Egyptian revolution: How civic engagement and citizen journalism tilted the balance. Arab Media and Society, (3), -25. Kingdon, J. W., & Thurber, J. A. (98). Agendas, alternatives, and public policies. 5. Boston: Little, Brown. Krippendorff, K. (200). Reliability in content analysis. Human Communication Research, 30(3), Kwak, H., Lee, C., Park, H., & Moon, S. (200). What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In Proceedings of the 9th international conference on World wide web ACM. Loader, B. D., & Mercea, D. (20). Networking democracy? Social media innovations and participatory politics. Information, Communication & Society, (6), Meraz, S. (2009). Is there an elite hold? Traditional media to social media agenda setting influence in blog networks. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, (3), Morgan, S., Nackerud, L., & Yegidis, B. (998). Domestic Violence Gun Ban: An Analysis of Interest-Group Conflict. Affilia, 3(), Phuvipadawat, S., & Murata, T. (200). Breaking news detection and tracking in Twitter. In Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), 200 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference, 3, IEEE Pleck, E. H. (987). Domestic tyranny: The making of social policy against family violence from colonial times to the present.50. New York: Oxford University Press. Poell, T., de Kloet, J., & Zeng, G. (20). Will the real Weibo please stand up? Chinese online contention and actor-network theory. Chinese Journal of Communication, 7(), -8. Rui, J. R., Chen, Y., & Damiano, A. (203). Health organizations providing and seeking social support: a Twitter-based content analysis. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 6(9), Schechter, S. (982). Women and male violence: The visions and struggles of the battered women's movement. South End Press. Small, T. A. (20). What the hashtag? A content analysis of Canadian politics on Twitter. Information, Communication & Society, (6), Tao, J., Zheng, B., & Mow, S. L. (200). Holding up half the sky: Chinese women past, present, and future. Feminist Press at CUNY. Tierney, K. J. (982). The battered women movement and the creation of the wife beating problem. Social Problems, Tumasjan, A., Sprenger, T. O., Sandner, P. G., & Welpe, I. M. (200). Predicting elections with twitter: What 0 characters reveal about political sentiment. ICWSM, 0, Wanta, W., Golan, G., & Lee, C. (200). Agenda setting and international news: Media influence on public perceptions of foreign nations. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 8(2), WHO, Violence against women, 206, retrieved from Wright, D. K., & Hinson, M. D. (2008). How blogs and social media are changing public relations and the way it is practiced. Public relations journal, 2(2), -2. 5