Author(s) Chagai Weiss (University of Wisconsin - Madison) - cmweiss@stanford.edu Alexandra Siegel (University of Colorado Boulder) - Alexandra.Siegel@colorado.edu Alexandra Scacco (WZB) - alex.scacco@wzb.eu
Pre-registered on 2022/08/11 - 07:29 AM (PT)
1) Have any data been collected for this study already? No, no data have been collected for this study yet.
2) What's the main question being asked or hypothesis being tested in this study? What share of survey respondents select to read Facebook posts written by Palestinians?
What demographic variables predict selecting to read Facebook posts written by Palestinians?
What explanations do respondents provide for avoiding Palestinian Facebook posts?
3) Describe the key dependent variable(s) specifying how they will be measured. The key dependent variable is a respondents selection indicating their interest in reading Palestinian Facebook posts, relative to posts written by other groups, in a choice task. 0= No, 1= Yes.
To address measurement concerns we randomize the choice task. Half of our sample will be asked to select a single type of posts to be read, and the other half can select any type of post. Types of posts include: Posts written by secular Jews in Jerusalem about their daily life, Posts written by religious Jews in Jerusalem about their daily life, Posts written by Ultra Orthofox Jews in Jerusalem about their daily life, and Posts written by Palestinians in East Jerusalem about their daily life.
4) How many and which conditions will participants be assigned to? Our primary questions do not relate to experimental manipulations. However, our choice task used to measure the key outcome has two versions, to which respondents are randomly assigned. We explore variation in response to the different versions of the choice task in our secondary analyses.
5) Specify exactly which analyses you will conduct to examine the main question/hypothesis. To answer question 1, we plot a histogram of the proportion of respondents selecting to read Palestinian Facebook posts.
To answer question 2, we estimate bivariate regressions with lm_robust() regressing our main outcome over the following demographic variables: social media usage, gender, age group, ideology, religiosity, support for diversity of perspectives online, affect towards Palestnians, and education.
To answer question 3, we plot a histogram of the proportion of respondents citing 8 different explanations for avoidance of Palestinian posts. These include,
"Reading will not change anything"
"Other priorities"
"Will feel fear"
"I've seen enough"
"Will feel anger"
"Will feel despair"
"Will feel uncomfortable"
"Will feel shame"
Other, please specify (we will also examine any open responses)
To further understand peoples selection of posts, we examine a question in which we asked respondents why they selected the posts that they selected. Answers include:
"It's a subject that I care about and am interested in"
"I don't know a lot about the group and I want to learn more"
"Posts about the group are hard to read but it is important for me to learn about hard topics"
Other, please specify (we will also examine any open responses)
6) Describe exactly how outliers will be defined and handled, and your precise rule(s) for excluding observations. We only exclude respondents who fail 2 pre-treatment attention checks.
7) How many observations will be collected or what will determine sample size? No need to justify decision, but be precise about exactly how the number will be determined. n=1000.
8) Anything else you would like to pre-register? (e.g., secondary analyses, variables collected for exploratory purposes, unusual analyses planned?) We plan to examine the sensitivity of our core results to different versions of our choice task that are described in section 3.
