COMM 411

Public Opinion Research

Assignments

CITI Certificate

The CITI (Collaborative Institutional Training Initiative) program is committed to safeguard the ethical integrity of research programs. In this training, you will learn some risks associated with research projects that involve human subjects. You must complete the basic certificate in Human Subjects Research (Group 1: Undergraduate Students).

In this link, you can find the instructions to complete the certificate.

And this is the link to the CITI program Web-site.

Midterm Exam

There will be only one exam in this course. The midterm will focus exclusively on the theoretical contents. All the material you need to to prepare the exam will be available in the course’s Web-site.

There will be no make-up exams (except for well documented medical emergencies). All the assessments in this course will take place online, in the Blackboard Vista environment. Please, make sure that you are familiar with the system before the day scheduled for the exams.

The midterm exam is an online exam with 5 short essay questions, each worth 20 points. You have 3 hours to complete the exam and can answer each one of the questions in around 250-300 words.

General Considerations

The midterm exam will be available the whole day. Still, the time to complete it is limited (3 hours). Be aware that time starts running when you begin the assessment.

PLEASE, DO NOT USE ANY QUOTE IN YOUR ANSWERS. THE GOAL OF OPEN ENDED OR ESSAY QUESTIONS IS TO FIND OUT TO WHICH EXTENT YOU UNDERSTOOD THE IDEAS AND CONCEPTS DISCUSSED IN THE COURSE AND ARE ABLE TO EXPRESS/ARTICULATE THEM WITH YOUR OWN WORDS.

If you have any technical issue during the completion of the exam, please contact immediately the help desk to report the incident (860 832 1720).

Public Opinion Research Paper / Presentation

In this assignment, you must select a topic the public may fell strong about. The stronger the feelings, the more likely you will find interesting material in your research. Then, you have to find actual data from surveys about that topic. You should structure your project addressing the following points – and in the same order.

  1. Introduction of the topic. Describe the issue you are going to talk about, why it may be controversial, and why is interesting for you.
  2. Show raw/general data of the public’s feelings and opinions about the issue.
  3. Break down the general data using demographic characteristics (gender, income, ideology, education) to better explain the distribution of the public opinion.
  4. Finally, make you own interpretation of the data.

Follow the APA guideline for the writing and layout style. You can either write a paper (10-12 pages, double-spaced, Times font 12).

Papers are delivered online through the particular assignment’s page in Blackboard Learn. I will not accept papers sent through any e-mail system. Make sure that you attach you paper as a PDF or Microsoft WORD document. If you send the assignment in any other format, I may not be able to open it.

In this page, you can find some online resources to search for data for your projects:

Resources Page

This assignment encompasses a class presentation of about 10-15 minutes. You will have to present to your class mates the data found on the selected topic (broken down on the basis of demographics characteristics). The presentation will make 5% of your final grade.

Public Opinion Research Project

In this assignment, you will have to develop your own research model, including the design of a questionnaire, the decision about the sample method, the data collection and the interpretation of your data.

In order to start the date collection phase of the project, you MUST

1 – complete your CITI certificate

2 – define your research question

3 – get my explicit approval to deploy the final version of the questionnaire.

The Public Opinion Research Projects should be structured as follows:

  • Statement of the research question/s (5%)
  • Description of the sampling method (10%)
  • Questionnaire design (10%)
  • Data (40%)
    • Frequencies
    • Crosstabs
    • Correlations
    • Mediation analysis
    • Inferential (voluntary)
  • Interpretation of data (25%)
  • Conclusion (10%)

Addendum (a copy of the actual questionnaire used in the project, including the statement of consent)

You must also follow APA style guidelines for this paper.

Tables and graphs must be generated with SPSS (Statistical Package for Social Sciences). Learning this software is an integral part of this course.

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