Personalized Advertising Project Progress -- Week 1

When indulging in social media, do you find those advertisements in your timeline disturbing, or appealing? How do you respond to them? Do you click on "hide ad" or "sign up" and have a look? Do you feel the options the websites give to you, such as "it's not relevant" and "I see it too often", really offer you the freedom of choice? With these questions, I decided on personalized advertising (PA) which appears increasingly often on social media as my research objective. And the question I address in my research would be: what attributes of personalized advertisements on social media would affect users’ attitude and how’s users’ attitude towards them? I planed to do a survey on users' attitudes towards PA as well as an observance research on their genuine reaction. 

On sampling, I would choose students of Columbia University as the samples to make this process feasible. Professor Gorski suggested this very useful survey software Qualtrics and I spend some time getting familiar to its affordances. It turns out this software has powerful survey design, distribution and data collecting functions. I find out that it can even do weighting thus if my samples skew towards some certain groups I can still fix it with this function. Although the software offers multiple distributing ways, such as emailing the survey, sharing a link through social media or messages, or sharing a QR code, based on my previous experiences, collecting enough valid sample data is still a tough task. I plan to make a base line as 300 valid samples which could represent the population characteristics of students in our university, which means these 300 samples should cover overall grades, genders, nationalities and maybe majors of the students. My primitive plan is to first reach to several students from different grades, departments and nationalities and ask for their help to distribute the survey among their networks. If you have done such survey before and have some experience in reaching to samples and motivating them to finish the survey thoughtfully, please do share your ideas with me!

As for observation, Professor Gorski reminded me of getting the participants' permission, which I would pay attention to. I plan to appeal to 10 participants to use their social media normally and I would observe and make notes of their reactions towards PAs, which would include their standing time on advertisements, their following moves, differences in different advertisements types and so on. After reacting to 10 or more advertisements, I would do interviews with them about their reasons on certain choices.

For next week, I will read more literature to draw more specified hypotheses on the relationship between PA attributes and audience attitudes. And after that, my focus will be on designing survey questions and observing objectives.