Linking survey and social media data to understand the social media electorate

Linking survey and social media data to understand the social media electorate Jane Green (IQSS affiliate) with Rachel Gibson, Ros Southern, Ed Fieldhouse (University of Manchester, UK) Abstract This presentation assesses the reliability and utility of a novel form of election study data produced by tracking the social media activities of online survey respondents during a national election campaign. Specifically we evaluate the representativeness of a new data source – iBES – that was collected as part of the 2015 British Election Study (BES). iBES captured actual (rather than self-reported) Twitter and Facebook use by BES respondents, and their exposure to political/election content during the campaign. The analysis proceeds in three stages. First we compare our iBES sample to the wider Twitter and Facebook using ‘populations’ measured with the BES post-election random probability survey. We then construct weights that adjust our opt-in sample (iBES) to better approximate the Twitter and Facebook using electorate. Finally, we demonstrate the importance of applying these corrective procedures by reporting the weighted and unweighted frequencies for iBES respondents on a number of key political attitudes and behaviors. The study is important in that it demonstrates how, once ‘corrected’, such samples can yield important new insights into social media users’ online experiences during an election that survey methods alone are unable to extract.