2011 GENERAL ELECTIONS IN SOCIAL MEDIA: QUANTITATIVE-QUALITATIVE INTERFACE ANALYSIS

This study is the part covering the development and evaluation of quantitative and qualitative research methods for the interface examination of the project titled “use of facebook and twitter by political parties and leaders in 2011 general elections in turkey” and supported by the scientific and technological research council of turkey during the period of november 2011- november 2012. in the research project, the use of facebook and twitter by political parties and their leaders during the 2011 general elections is examined based on the hypothesis that web 2.0 contributes to the development of citizenship culture on the basis of democratic participation. in this study, the relation between the messages of political parties and/or their leaders and the ediscussion amongst electors/citizens on social media interface is examined and to this end, the research team has developed a technical scheme for the qualitative and quantitative content analysis in order to analyse the official accounts of political parties and leaders on facebook and twitter. in this communiqué, research methods and techniques for the interface examination through qualitative-quantitative content analysis of social media (facebook and internet) will be discussed based on the theoretical framework of the project mentioned above. first the discussion on “how to conduct qualitative and quantitative content analysis on facebook and twitter” and the formation process of coding form to be used for this research will be presented. then, some examples from facebook walls and tweets on twitter accounts that are used by political parties and their leaders and where coding form is applied will be shared and the process of creating database will be communicated. finally, the efforts to develop research techniques and tools to examine the use of social media within the scope of the studies on political communication and new media will be discussed and evaluated. it is thought that this discussion will contribute to the field researches on interface within the scope of new media studies.