Critiquing Reported Research on Climate Change Framing in Social Media
Overview
This assignment critiques a news article reporting on research about how climate change is framed on social media by NGOs across 18 countries. The student evaluates the article's author credibility, statistical reporting, conclusions, and addresses limitations and sampling methodology by examining both the news piece and the underlying empirical research.
What this coursework covers
- Part 1: URLs to news and empirical articles provided
- Part 2: Critical analysis of news article including author qualification, descriptive statistics, conclusions, and limitations
- Part 3: Examination of empirical article's sampling frame and methodology
Preview
Assignment 9
Critiquing Reported Research
Part 1
Provide the URL to news article here: https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2020/12/researchers-explore-how-climate-change-is-framed-on-social-media/
Provide URL to empirical article here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1075547020971644
Part 2
- What is the article about?
The article is a report about a research that explored how climate change is framed within social media. Through the article, the author focuses on the representation of climate-related information from Facebook posts of NGOs from 18 countries. The article gives a summary of the research, how it was conducted, and the findings. They focused on the framing of climate change in social media, a detailed outlook at the content of the posts and number of times the different aspects of climate change were mentioned in each post. Therefore, the article is an interpretation of the findings from the study, including benefits and action points for each.
- Who wrote it? Based on a quick Google (or other) search, do you think they are qualified to interpret the results of the study? Why or why not?
The article was written by Sarah DeWeerdt, a freelance science journalist who specializes in medicine, biology, and the environment. She is qualified to interpret the results of the research based on her experience as a freelance science editor.
- Did they report any descriptive statistics? If they did, how did they report the statistics?
The descriptive statistics were mentioned as a summary of the actual research.
- What conclusions did they draw?
The conclusion was that NGOs are doing exceptional work in communicating the immediacy of climate change to their audience.