Thesis on SOSEC Analyzing a survey on political and socially relevant topics

Type: Bachelor or Master thesis

Date: open (as of now)

Supervisor: David Borukhson

Research Context

Within the SOSEC project (https://www.socialsentiment.org/en/) we compile biweekly survey data using a panel on political and socially relevant topics since November 2022. We thus already gathered a large multidimensional dataset that allows for highly interesting analyses.

Goal of the Thesis

We want to evaluate the already collected survey data according to different methods. Some possible goals for a thesis could be:

• Statistical analysis on data (i. e. demographic or topic focused, such as opinions on Middle East conflict, dealing with misinformation, susceptibility to conspiracy narratives)
• Defining group memberships through clustering methods and detection of temporal dynamics in opinions and sentiments
• Interpretable ML-Methods for forecasting social sentiments

Formal Prerequisites

The topics are suitable for Bachelor as well as Master theses, the scope and methods can be discussed. Programming experience in Python is of advantage as well as an interest in modern democracy research. For any questions feel free to reach out (david.borukhson@kit.edu)!

Please send us a short motivation letter and a current transcript of records. A thesis may be written either in German or in English. Starting dates can be arranged as of now.