Research context

Within the ongoing SOSEC project (https://www.socialsentiment.org/en/) we compile biweekly survey data using a panel on political and socially relevant topics since November 2022. We thus already gathered a large multidimensional dataset that allows for highly interesting analyses.

Goal of the thesis

You could participate in evaluate our empirical survey data using different methods. Some possible goals for a thesis could be:

• Theory-driven statistical analysis on data, topic-focused. Open topics:

  • Rural-urban cleavages,

  • media use and mental health,

  • opinions on Middle East conflict,

  • dealing with misinformation,

  • susceptibility to conspiracy narratives.

• Defining group memberships through clustering methods and detection of temporal dynamics in opinions and sentiments

• Interpretable ML-Methods for forecasting social sentiments

Formal prerequisites

The topics are suitable for Bachelor as well as Master theses, the scope and methods will be specified accordingly. Programming experience in Python or R is of advantage as well as an interest in contemporary democracy studies.

Please send us a short motivation letter and a current transcript of records. A thesis may be written either in German or in English. Starting dates can be arranged as of now. For any questions feel free to reach out (david.borukhson∂kit.edu)!