Gender Politics Social Media Usage and Friending

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 the researcher actually measured what she set out to measure or whether the findings have any degree of generalizeability. Still, what the researcher did find was that men tended to report posting more political content than women and that women tended to report unfriending people based on their political communications more than men did. In all other ways, the researcher could not identify any gender differences in communication on social media with respect to politics.
The interpretation of the findings by the researcher was also interesting. Bode (2017) argued that the findings suggest that women tend to be less visible in their political communications on social media. For example, rather than posting original content they tend instead simply to like what another person posts or simply leave a comment. For the most part, they do not instigate conversations by posting political messages. The researcher surmises that women are simply trying to be as inoffensive as possible in most cases when it comes to political messaging. Their gender influences them to want to promote relationships rather than add strain to relationships by creating tension with political posts, sensing as they must that politics is polarizing and can lead to negative reactions among some.
The study concluded with a number of questions raised by the researcher for future inquiry, such as whether women behave similarly offline when it comes to communicating about politics—i.e., do they tend to be non-confrontational and prefer to follow whatever the political mood is within the company they are keeping rather than bring up political topics and invite others to agree or disagree. At the outset of the study, the researcher noted that gender differences in politics focused on interest, knowledge and participation. It would be interesting to see if these differences also occurred on social media communications, where views are much more public. In real life, people tend to keep their political views somewhat private. In social media, what is private often becomes public.
Although the study conducted by Bode (2017) is quantitative and looks at mean, standard deviation and Cronbach’s alpha, there is no sense that the researcher is actually measuring what she has purported to measure. She never discusses validity in her report and the discussion of limitations leaves out the issue of how to control for variables not identified the data tested. Thus, for example, it may be that women who unfriended people over political beliefs also had certainly personality 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.
References
Bode, L. (2017). Closing the gap: Gender parity in political engagement on social media. Information, Communication & Society, 20(4), 587-603.