Reaction Paper
The article by Bode (2017) looks at gender differences in social media communication and particularly in how different genders engage in political discourse on social media. Bode (2017) notes that historically there have always been gender differences in political engagement and in online content creation. The study combines to the two realms of research and examines whether any clear differences emerge in terms of how men and women communicate about politics on social media platforms. While the study did find some slight differences, the main takeaway was that these differences generally only occurred in the most visible political behaviors—i.e., men were more likely to post political information on their social media pages, and women were more likely to unfriend or unfollow people based on political reasons (Bode, 2017).

The researcher tested data obtained from the Pew Internet & American Life ‘Social networking sites and politics’ survey, from 2012. This means the researcher did not actually conduct a survey herself but rather used data from another survey and then cross-referenced it using independent and control variables to see what effect gender had on social media users when it came to communicating about politics. There were obvious limitations involved in the study—such as the fact that self-reported data is not the most reliable, and that the data presented in the survey might not have been fully accurate. Another interesting limitation, however, was the fact that the researcher could not fully control for all variables that might factor into the online behavior of a social media user. For instance, the researcher had no way of knowing the personality of the individuals who responded in the Pew survey. There was no way to control for personality; rather, the researcher was limited to controlling for race, age, education and so on—rather superficial variables since the main focus is on communication behaviors rather than on demographics.

Nonetheless, the research study was informative—if not necessarily valid or reliable, since it is difficult to ascertain whether...…types or possibly even personality disorders—or possibly even other social reasons for unfriending a person, such as perhaps that person was not a close friend anyway and the individual female was simply looking for a way to vent or feel self-righteous at the moment and recalled the incident differently when responding to the survey. Also, the fact that the researcher did not have any control over the survey, i.e., could not engage in member checking for the purpose of reliability, indicates that the study is limited in terms of validity and yet this limitation was not even discussed at all in the write-up.

Overall, the findings of the study were interesting, but beyond being of interest they cannot be used to confirm or deny any hypothesis related to gender differences in communication when it comes to communicating about politics or to communicating about politics online. However, the study could be used to generate research questions to pursue with a more valid research method in the future.