research
Research
As of March 3, 2023
Political Communication
The area of research where I have spent a significant majority of my time is political communication. Generally speaking, I am interested in the ways that members of Congress engage with their constituents. In the fall of 2012, I, along with three graduate students and my Media & Politics class (38 undergraduates), followed all of the candidates for the U.S. House on Twitter during the last two months of the campaign (1,119 candidates). We performed a content analysis on how these individuals used Twitter (67,119 tweets), and found that certain groups were significantly more active and tweeted differently than others. For instance, we found that female candidates were significantly more active on Twitter, and were more likely to attack their opponents than male candidates. An overview of our research findings was published by PS: Political Science and Politics and was highlighted on the Monkey Cage. We also received the Pi Sigma Alpha award for the best paper presented at the Southwest Political Science Conference. At that point in time, no researcher had collected all of the tweets sent by candidates for seats in Congress, let alone hand-coded each tweet for content. As one colleague remarked at one of our various presentations in 2013, those in the social sciences “could all learn a lot from the way [we] used students in [our] research” especially since we lacked research funds.
I continued this line of research in the summer of 2013 by collecting and content analyzing tweets sent by members of Congress with two undergraduate students (41,191 tweets). Our research was published at the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. Using this same dataset, I also published an article at American Politics Research on how women use Twitter (with Dr. Jennifer Clark from the University of Houston), and at Online Information Review. My research specifically about gender and Twitter use was highlighted on the London School of Economics blog and the Pacific Standard, the award winning magazine on public policy.
In the fall of 2014, I collected data on how candidates for the U.S. House and Senate used Twitter (1279 candidates, 125,474 tweets), and received a EURECA (Enhancing Undergraduate Research Experiences and Creative Activities) grant to fund my research work with three undergraduate students. Our manuscript on the ways candidates used mudslinging in the 2014 election was published at Social Media + Society.
In the Spring of 2016, I received a EURECA grant from the SHSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences to continue my work during the 2016 election. I, along with two of our undergraduate students (Kayla Brown and Tiffany Wimberly), collected and content analyzed the tweets sent by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump from June 1st through Election Day. Our findings were published at the Social Science Computer Review, and we wrote a chapter for The Internet and the 2016 Presidential Campaign, edited by Jody Baumgartner and Terri Towner.
During the 2016 election cycle, I also collected all of the tweets sent by all candidates for the U.S. House and Senate with my undergraduate Media & Politics class, as well as my graduate assistant. In the summer of 2017, I received a EURECA grant from the SHSU College of Humanities and Social Sciences to hand-code this data with three undergraduate students (Jeremiah Gibson, Marlisa Ensley, and Janay Rogers-Southwell). I also continued working with four additional students (Jessica Habib, Bryan San Jose, Danielle Litzen, and Ashlee Ziegenbein) on 2014 election data, and our work on the Twitter style independent candidates was published at PS.
In the summer of 2018, I received another grant from my college to work with three students (Erick Rodas, Michaela Woodard, and Allison Faith) on a project involving the way that congressional candidates tweet about President Trump. I also worked with an additional student (Miranda Estrada) who was in the McNair program on a project involving the way that women discussed policies on Twitter in 2016. Both Michaela and Miranda presented our research at the Midwest Political Science Association meeting in 2019.
After arriving at UVA Wise in the fall of 2019, I continued working with students on research related to political communication. As part of the Undergraduate Summer Scholars program, I have worked with two students over the past three years, and I have also collaborated with three additional students on independent projects. In the Summer of 2020, Jackson Jannell, one of the UVA deferred students, began working on a project with Michaela Woodard and Miranda Estrada (from SHSU) on the way that candidates in 2016, 2018, and 2020 discussed Trump on Twitter. That project, titled “All Aboard the #TrumpTrain: How House Candidates Discussed Trump on Twitter in 2016, 2018, and 2020” was published in The Internet and 2020 Campaign, edited by Terri Towner and Jody Baumgartner (Lexington Books) in 2022.
Another undergraduate student, Rian Moore, and I were very interested in the ways that candidates for the House and Senate discussed important policy issues in the 2020 election (specifically the economy, COVID-19, and the Black Lives Matter movement). Rian (one of our Summer Scholars) presented our work at the 2022 Midwest Political Science Association meeting, and our research is currently under review for publication.
Two additional students, Bryson Roberson and Andrew Leonard, also worked on an independent study with me in the fall of 2021 related to the way that candidates for Congress tweeted during the 2020 election, and both presented their work at the 2022 Midwest Political Science Association meeting and Research Day at UVA Wise.
I am currently working on a book chapter with another UVA Wise student, Katelynn Parton. Katelynn, a UVA Wise Summer Scholar, and I are examining the ways that candidates in the congressional elections in Virginia tweeted during the primary and general election in 2022. She, along with a team of students from the University of Kentucky, the University of Houston, and the University of Texas San Antonio, generated a cumulative demographic data file and contributed to the data collection for all of the tweets sent during the 2022 congressional elections. Our preliminary results show that incumbents tweeted very differently during their primary and general elections, and gender played a large role in both the issues that were discussed and the amount of negativity present in election tweets.
Elections and Political Engagement
Since my time at Berea College, I have been interested in understanding the motivating factors behind political engagement, defined broadly. In 2009, I graduated from Indiana University with my Ph.D after writing a dissertation on how college and non-college young people (18-24 year olds) participate in the political process. I asked how socioeconomic, institutional, life-cycle, and socialization factors influenced the political engagement of young people in the 2000s.
While at SHSU, I continued researching political engagement, public opinion, and elections. In 2014, my book Competitive Elections and American Democracy: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, was published by Routledge. My book is about both the positive and negative effects of competitive congressional elections on citizens. As one of the reviewers of my book notes, “[I] examine an important topic that has far-reaching consequences for democracy.”
Along these lines, Dr. Edward Carmines (Indiana University), Dr. Michael Ensley (Kent State University), and I published a piece on competitive congressional elections and political engagement at the Journal of Elections, Public Opinion, and Parties. In our article, we show that competitive elections increase citizens’ levels of knowledge, interest, and engagement even after the election is over. I also have a solo-authored piece on the lasting effect of competitive elections on attitudes towards Congress at Electoral Studies.
I have also published research on what affects political engagement both online and offline. Specifically, Dr. Stacy Ulbig (SHSU) and I examined whether citizens who were more sociable engaged differently both in-person and online during the 2010 election. We found that citizens with higher levels of sociability were more likely to engage in traditional forms of political engagement, but were no more likely to engage in political discussions online than those with lower levels of sociability.
Pedagogical
Stemming from my interest in political engagement and elections, I applied for and was awarded the Faculty Research Grant in my first year at SHSU. The project that I completed involved the political engagement of our undergraduates. In particular, I was interested in the effect certain college experiences, like college major and service learning, has on youth engagement. I surveyed all incoming freshmen and their families during the summer of 2010. Four years later I re-surveyed those who took part in the project a second time. What I found was that students who took Academic Community Engagement (ACE) courses significantly increased their levels of political interest and efficacy, and decreased their levels of political apathy over the four-year time period. My results were published in the journal of Education, Citizenship, and Social Justice.
As a follow-up to my research on ACE courses, I have completed projects regarding the use of videos in online classes and clickers in the traditional classroom. In 2011, I received an Online Innovation Grant and published three articles from this research, one with a graduate student.
I also edited two books for Rowman and Littlefield on incorporating community engagement in the classroom. The books, which were published in 2017 and 2018, address the best practices for including service learning in the classroom, as well as the various research findings across the disciplines.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, I have been exceptionally productive while on a 3-3 load, and continuously mentor and publish with both undergraduate and graduate students. Over the next five years, I plan to continue my research on how members of Congress use Twitter both during and after elections, as well as my work on competitive elections and public opinion.
Curriculum Vitae * Teaching * Research * Congress & The Legislatures * Media & Politics