Outside Reading: Park and Choi's The Internet as a Political Campaign Medium

Park, H. S., & Choi, S. M. (2002). Focus Group Interviews: The Internet as a Political Campaign Medium. Public Relations Quarterly, 47(4), 36–44.

In this article, Park and Choi conducted focus groups in order to understand the effect that websites have on perceptions of political candidates. In particular, they were interested in whether interactivity on the website translated into a feeling of having interacted with the candidate.

The study was conducted in 2000 during the Bush/Gore election. The participants for the focus group were undergraduates who were in advertising classes, all age 21 or older. For the study design, they asked participants to look at the websites of Bush and Gore for half an hour in a computer lab before convening the focus group. Once there, participants were asked questions about their experiences with the websites. The questions were formulated with the intent of using Media Richness Theory in the study.

From a methodological point of view, one of the problems in this study is that the researchers specifically chose to have participants look at the websites for a certain amount of time. While this can be appropriate if you are looking for the baseline effectiveness of some kind of campaign material, it does not seem entirely useful for the purpose of their research. When trying to make generalizable claims about how the voting public is affected by candidate websites, you have to take into account that many are not affected at all, and even further, that those who are affected by the websites sometimes spread that information to others. It is possible to have secondhand knowledge of a website. By priming their participants, Park and Choi lost all possible data about whether their participants had seen or heard about the websites at all. It seems like it may have been useful to first distribute a survey or to have participants look at the websites partway through the focus group.

All of this is not to say that Park and Choi’s study does not have merit. Having been done in 2000, the study fell at a particularly valuable juncture when the web components of political campaigns were first being explored. Park and Choi describe the responses of participants to both Bush and Gore’s websites; those who liked Bush’s website appreciated its simplicity and those who liked Gore’s website appreciated how well it covers all relevant issues. At this point in digital media development, we know that both approaches are extremely valuable. Though they eventually conclude that interactive features on websites are not perceived as the same as interacting with the candidates, they do identify early efforts at personalization as being useful (which were later used to great effect by the Obama campaign).