Panel of Public Opinion on Social Media by the Lab Featured at WAPOR 2012

Panel of Public Opinion on Social Media by the Lab Featured at WAPOR 2012

Lab members presented five papers in a well-received panel at the 65th Annual Conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR 2012), June 14-16, 2012 at the University of Hong Kong. The papers, organized in a panel on “Public Opinion on Social Media”, described the characteristics of or assessed the validity of opinions emerged from online forums, blogs, microblogs, or search queries as indicators of the general public opinion at large. The panel drew a full room of audiences with heated discussions that followed the presentations.

• Liang, H., & Shen, F. (2012). Representation of political discussions in web forums: A cross-national assessment. (Full Text)
• Lu, H. (2012). Public opinion between blogsphere and real world. (Full Text)
• Wang, C. J., & Peng, T. Q. (2012). Evaluating public discussion of occupying Wall Street on Twitter: Linking Twitter streams with search quires, opinion polls, media coverage, and stock market index. (Full Text)
• Zhang, L., Peng, T. Q., Zhang, Y. P., & Wang, X. H. (2012). Content or context: Which carries more weight in predicting popularity of Tweets in China. (Full Text)
• Zhu, J. J. H., Wang, X. H., Qin, J., & Wu, L. F. (2012). Assessing public opinion trends based on user search queries: Validity, reliability, and practicality. (Full Text)

In addition to the panel, members of the Lab contributed papers to two other sessions (Peng, T. Q. (2012). Application of Data Mining in Internet Research; Wang, C. J., & Wang, P. P. (2012). Discussing Occupying Wall Street on Twitter: Longitudinal Network Analysis of Equality, Emotion, and Stability of Public Discuss.). This was the first time for WAPOR to hold its annual aonference outside Europe and North America since its establishment 65 years ago.