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The Spiral of Silence in Virtual Space: Examining How Expert Participation, Digital Media Form, and Opinion Congruency Relate to Opinion Expression

This study tested the spiral of silence in both Social Networking Sites (SNS) and online discussion forums. It argued that online expert participation may influence people's willingness to take part in an online discussion. A two (opinion climate) by two (expert participation) experiment was designed to examine how expert participation influenced the relationship between peoples willingness to speak out and opinion climate with the controversial topic: abortion. In this study, the spiral of silence effect was only found when experts were present in the discussion.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:LSU/oai:etd.lsu.edu:etd-05232015-003120
Date28 May 2015
CreatorsZhang, Yiwei
ContributorsWindels, Kasey, Pingree, Ray, DeFleur, Margaret
PublisherLSU
Source SetsLouisiana State University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
Sourcehttp://etd.lsu.edu/docs/available/etd-05232015-003120/
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