Framing Week – 1

1. Chapter 13 discusses the importance of research towards audience analysis and stresses the importance of knowing your audience through proven methods of both quantitative and qualitative data. I am curious as to how methods for gathering information on a particular audience base have changed within the context of online companies and their ability to track a user’s web activity even after leaving the site’s web page. This question is also relevant to sites with obvious interactivity methods in which the user is much more aware that their preferences are being monitored (on sites like Netflix).
2. I had a hard time imagining how one would go about proving with near certainty that changes in a dependent variable could not be attributed to anything other than changes in the independent variable. I would like to better understand the best practices to measure this particular evaluation tool.
3. What are some ways to insure that experiments conducted on Elon’s campus could potentially be seen as representative of college students nation-wide in terms of stratified random sampling, quota and other random sampling methods. (I ask since Elon is a smaller and private University)
4. How has agenda setting theory been changed, challenged or upheld with the increase in citizen journalism?
5. How has diffusion theory been modified through the growth of large online networks of people blogging, forwarding and tweeting?

These questions might be way too specific for what we will be covering in class this week, but I didn’t have many questions about the basic theories or methods in which theories are researched.