living, thinking and writing
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Friday, February 07, 2003 Research idea Until last week, I still planed to focus my dissertation research on Internet metrics, which I just started a little bit with Alex last semester (and has paused since then because of so much other work). But I had been thinking about changing the topic, since yesterday, when I started to analyze textural data of my survey on American's exposure and knowledge of foreign countries. Schopenghua said "the world is my idea". That was the first words coming into my mind when I read about what my respondents know about the other countries of the world, although what Schopenghua really meant is a little different. I was amazed by what kind of information retained in respondents¡¯ mind and what perception they hold for each individual foreign country. How do they come up with these ideas (from textbook, TV, internet, movie, friends, entertainment show, or the president¡¯s speech?)? I found the knowledge respondents presented about different countries comes with attitude and tone (admiration, hatred or condescension), So based on the information and knowledge, will the attitudes differ in sense of friends to strangers, or friends to enemies? I¡¯m even thinking about using Galileo to achieve a network graph with friends in the center and strangers or enemies in the periphery. My project so far has found the knowledge on different countries highly correlate with positions in the World System only when core countries are included. The difference within periphery and semi-periphery is not very significant, where I got a lot of residuals that I could not explained empirically. I guess the attitude (friends to strangers, or friends to enemies) will better fit the regression on world system. The other hypothesis comes out naturally: Is the attitude on foreign countries consistent with mainstream political agenda setting? Or public opinion (or attitudes towards foreign countries) acturally is more shaped by inflow of cultural products (entertainment)? To be more constructive, which might boost my opportunity getting fund, how can we help people especially young people established objective perception of foreign countries? Now I came up with an ambitious idea to develop this project into a dissertation, and of course, that is where I need money for: to design a survey online (definitely this time), a much more questions of covering broader range and more details (source of information, more knowledge, emotion and attitudes, more countries (at least 50 to 60 I guess). I need a more respondents with higher diversity (different city, different groups, different races maybe). I need to train people who can supervise the survey for me (be sure respondents finish the long surveys, they don¡¯t look for information on line and encourage them to write as much as possible, and they are from different cities). And of course, I need to reimburse respondents who spend one hour or so to fill out my survey. And I need to travel maybe, to visit other researchers to promote my research so they can collaborate with me on survey? Since most of grants are only given to institutions instead of individuals, I might need to get support from the department. That is not too bad: School of Informatics got research fund to study the effect of international information flow. In worst scenario, where I did not get any funding from grant givers, I can realize the research by using only UB students. Maybe Mark Diamond Research Fund from GSA will help me a little bit? posted by lmeimei @1:25 PM| permanent link| | |
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