Ten PhD students presented a total of nine papers at the 2012 annual conference of the World Association for Public Opinion Research (WAPOR 2012), held at University of Hong Kong on June 14-16.  The papers covered a variety of topics on public opinion in either real life or cyberspace (see the list below).  Four of the papers were presented in a special panel on Public Opinion on Social Media that described the characteristics of or assessed the validity of opinions emerged from online forums, blogs, microblogs, and search queries. 

 

Coauthors of the papers, Dr. Fei Shen, Dr. Lun Zhang, and Prof. Jonathan Zhu, also attended the conference.

 

• Liang, H., & Shen, F. (2012). Representation of political discussions in web forums: A cross-national assessment.
• Liu, Y. (2012). Explaining Political Trust from Ideological Distances with Political Parties.
• Lu, H. (2012). Public opinion between blogsphere and real world.
• Lv, Y. (2012). Reporting public opinion polls in China.
• Shen, F., & Moy P. (2012). Media Events and Media Effects on Public Opinion: Exploring Traditional Media and Internet Effects in China.
• Shen, F., Wang, T. J., & Tu, J. W. (2012). The Use of Web-based Survey in Communication and Public Opinion Research: Trends, Features, and Issues.
• Wang, C. J., & Peng, T. Q. (2012). Evaluating public discussion of occupying Wall Street on Twitter: Linking Twitter streams with search queries, opinion polls, media coverage, and stock market index.
• Wang, C. J., & Wang, P. P. (2012). Discussing Occupying Wall Street on Twitter: Longitudinal Network Analysis of Equality, Emotion, and Stability of Public Discuss.
• 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.
• 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.