My research also crosses disciplinary boundaries: my PhD project will, for instance, include insights from argumentation analysis (the pragma-dialectical approach more specifically) and incorporate methods from the fields of communication science and (through the application of computational methods) data science, hopefully russia rcs data giving rise to an approach to text-analysis that is in-depth, well founded as well as well rounded. By applying and combining (my knowledge of) these methods in novel ways, and using my supervisors’ methodological expertise, I hope to contribute both to knowledge in my field as well as to the development and improvement of social science and interdisciplinary research methods.
Among the data to be subjected to these analyses will be those I will collect (and have been collecting) through web scraping social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter, using their APIs, as well as data in the UK Data Service collection, including the British Election Study (BES) surveys. professor Cees van der Eijk, is part of the BES team. We frequently look at and analyse the BES data together, both for my work for the Committee as well as for my research, since these surveys measure British public opinion. We have specifically been looking for trends and changes in relation to the perceptions of the behaviour of political parties and the political attitudes of the British citizens more generally, investigating how and whether to link these findings to external political events and developments in the UK.