Voters offered payment to give their views
Published On Mon 30 Mar 2015 by Grant Hill
Citizens eligible to vote in the UK 2015 General Election have been invited to take part in University of Dundee research that will take a `snapshot’ of people’s election campaign views.
Participants from Dundee and the surrounding areas will receive £40 for taking part in the session on Thursday, 2nd April if they are selected to take part.
It will be the first of 20 focus groups taking place as part of the 2015 Qualitative Election Study of Britain (QESB 2015), a project led by Politics Lecturer Dr Edzia Carvalho, to identify how the various party campaigns are resonating with the public. QESB 2015 aims to provide an insight into the reasons, opinions, and motivations underlying voting behaviour, rather than the statistics generated by opinion polls and other surveys.
“This election could result in the most interesting political scenarios in recent British history,” said Dr Carvalho. “Voters are faced with an unprecedented range of political choices. We want to hear what they think of the various party leaders and what things will be important to their votes.’’
The first focus group will take place on the evening of Thursday 2 April during the televised ‘Leaders’ debate’.
Election studies take place across the world but the QESB hopes to set new standards in the field by looking beneath the raw data that such studies yield in order to understand influential factors on a more individual level. QESB 2015 has been supported by funding from the British Academy and Leverhulme Trust and the findings will be used together with research funded by the Carnegie Foundation into the Scottish referendum conducted in December 2014.
Researchers will gauge the individual issues of greatest concern to the electorate and how they relate to and influence voting intentions. The researchers will investigate the role of safe and marginal seats in influencing how people vote and how voters evaluate party leaders among other topics. The project can be followed on Facebook: /qualesb and Twitter: @qualesb
Anyone interested in taking part should contact Dr Carvalho at e.carvalho@dundee.ac.uk or visit http://www.dundee.ac.uk/humanities/forms/group672.
Participants using a smartphone, tablet or laptop during the debate will also have the opportunity to contribute to a project on how these devices are used to communicate political issues. For more information on this related project, contact Ms Katerina Gorkovenko at k.gorkovenko@dundee.ac.uk or visit http://goggleboxforresearch.wix.com/gogglebox.
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