MED2028M: Media Research: Methods & Proposal Design

Title: The Effect of Social Media Usage on Voters’ Participation and

Information Exposure

by Student Name

Submission Date: XXX

Submission ID: XXX

File Name: XXX

Word Count: XXX

1. Aim of the Research

The usage of social media has become diversified in its nature from the time it was introduced.

In early years of its introduction, the social media was used just as a communication technology

where the users used to share their activities, pictures, videos and to chat with their friends,

family members, and colleagues. The users have started to use social media as a source of getting

recent news, information, and happenings around the globe. The new wave of research studies

has also concluded that the social media users have regarded social media as a more reliable

source of information. Most recently, the world has witnessed the extensive usage of social

media during elections in USA, UK, India, and in other countries for find information about the

leading candidates. Due to this, most of the political campaigns around the globe are utilising

social media in a way to target the citizens more effectively. Moreover, the political parties are

using this platform to amend the opinion of the voters for their own benefits by circulating fake

information and stories. Most the political parties are having their social media cells or

departments in a way to communicate their messages to the general public. The proposed

research study is targeted towards exploring the impacts of social media on voters’ opinion.

Furthermore, the proposed study will also focus on finding the benefits of social media in a way

to get voters’ support. In order to achieve research objectives and also to answer the research

questions, the proposed study will get primary data by adopting quantitative approach where the

respondents will be asked to fill a questionnaire containing close-ended questions. The proposed

study will survey about 150 respondents. The respondents of the study will comprise of those

people from UK who are eligible to cast their vote (i.e. 18 and above years of age). The proposed

study will be deductive in its nature where the cross-sectional quantitative approach will be

adopted by utilising survey method. The proposed study will utilise convenience sampling
technique in a way to gather the primary data where the hypothesis will be formulated through

extensive analysis of related literature. The next section of the proposal is going to discuss the

related literature from the same area of research where the extensive analysis of journal articles,

web-material, news and magazine articles are going to be explored.