Record Details

Replication Data for "Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

View Archive Info
 
 
Field Value
 
Title Replication Data for "Channeling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EHSBGJ
 
Creator Bail, Christopher
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description This folder contains the replication files for the paper “Channelling Hearts and Minds: Advocacy Organizations, Cognitive-Emotional Currents, and Public Conversation” by Christopher A. Bail, Taylor Brown, and Marcus Mann, which appears in the American Sociological Review, 2017.

These data describe the social media outreach of 82 autism and organ donation advocacy organizations on Facebook between 2011-2012 collected via a social media application that collected public and non-public data from the Facebook Application Programming Interface and surveyed representatives of the organization in order to obtain additional information on the size, resources, and tactics of the organization as it attempts to generate attention for its cause on social media.

ABSTRACT OF ARTICLE: Do advocacy organizations stimulate public conversation about social problems by engaging in rational debate, or by appealing to emotions? We argue that rational and emotional styles of communication ebb and flow within public discussions about social problems due to the alternating influence of social contagion and saturation effects. These “cognitive-emotional currents” create an opportunity structure whereby advocacy organizations stimulate more conversation if they produce emotional messages after prolonged rational debate or vice versa. We evaluate this hypothesis using automated text-analysis techniques that measure the frequency of cognitive and emotional language within two advocacy fields on Facebook over 1.5 years and a web-based application that offered these organizations a complimentary audit of their social media outreach in return for sharing non-public data about themselves, their social media audiences, and the broader social context in which they interact. Time-series models reveal strong support for our hypothesis, controlling for 33 confounding factors measured by our Facebook application. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for future research on public deliberation, how social contagions relate to each other, and the emerging field of computational social science.
 
Subject Social Sciences
Computational Social Science
Social Media
Public Deliberation
Collective Emotions
Social Cognition
 
Contributor Bail, Christopher