School of Humanities and Social Science Division of Social Science 197 Social Media and the Spread of Mass Psychogenic Illness Supervisor: HENDRY David James / SOSC Student: IP Chak Fong / ECON Course: UROP 1100, Spring UROP 2100, Summer This research project aims to investigate the role of social contagion in causing the recent unusual spike in the number of teenage transgender identifications. This phenomenon, termed Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria (ROGD), is classified as a Mass Psychogenic Illness, which can spread through social contagion. Therefore, this research project seeks to collect evidence and explore the influence of social contagion on ROGD. The initial phase of the project focuses on gathering preliminary data from social media to test against the social contagion theory, while the current stage aims to expand the scale of data collection for further analysis. During this stage, over 4,000 posts from the online forum Reddit have been collected. These data will be used to build a machine learning model that will help classify any future data we plan to collect. The Political Economy of Conflict and Elections Supervisor: HENDRY David James / SOSC Student: CHAN Sum Lok / ECOF Course: UROP 1000, Summer This project explores the influence of structural factors and natural experiments on political phenomena, focusing on the 2016 and 2020 American general elections. The research aims to elucidate how public policies in language causally affect political outcomes. My role involves collecting and documenting ballot samples and text measures from these elections across five states, facilitating the creation of a comprehensive ballot archive for future studies. Additionally, I am responsible for capturing detailed ballot text measures from each county within these states during the specified election years, ensuring a robust archive for subsequent academic studies on how the number of languages provided on ballots affect voters participation rate. The Political Economy of Conflict and Elections Supervisor: HENDRY David James / SOSC Student: CHAN Tsun Ming / FINA IRFAN Muhammad Zohaib / COMP SU Hankai / GCS-SOSC LO Kwun Wa / ECON WONG Ming Pan / GCS-SOSC Course: UROP 1000, Summer UROP 1000, Summer UROP 1000, Summer UROP 1100, Summer UROP 1100, Summer UROP 3100, Summer This report serves as a follow-up report and progress report with regard to the previous progress in investigating the data availability and the dataset we had previously targeted. For this semester specifically, we investigated the data availability of geographical information and variables in the Afrobarometer survey and the IPUMS census data at the subnational level. We found that such information included each of the 39 African countries documented in Afrobarometer surveys differed, and this report aimed to report such issues and provide a general reference to adopting suitable analytical strategies at later stages.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDk5Njg=