The Research Methods course for Communication with Dr. Lori Peterson, is a class that is built around the completion of an experimental research paper. The group project required a small pilot research project to study a Communication topic of interest that the group chooses. The paper describes/reports that our pilot project will be written as a group effort. The project needed research beyond the assigned readings and required a professional level of writing. Throughout the this course we also learned more about the role that research methods plays in the production of human knowledge. The required reading and lectures introduced various communication theories and methods to use while formulating our study.
Our group conducted a qualitative study and researched trolling on Twitter and how that relates to various celebrities based on their gender. The title of the paper is “Gender and Trolling: The Relationship on Twitter.” The celebrities we chose to gather data from were Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Kanye, and Justin Beiber. We examined 400 tweets that were examined, 100 tweets per celebrity, and they were broken down into six different categories in order to identify what the trollers are tweeting about when harassing the celebrities. The 6 categories identified were appearance, personality, performance, talent, relationships and other. Once we had our research findings we then critically evaluated the research findings.
Professional Portfolio 