Why Political Polarization
in the First Place?

I knew I wanted to research something related to politics. But I also knew that focusing on just one specific issue for the entire year would feel unfulfilling. So, instead, I looked to the root cause of why American politics felt so broken: polarization.

How I Got to My Specific Gap

I knew I wanted to study teenagers for several reasons:

1. They were a really accessible demographic for me to use in a study.

2. They are uniquely susceptible to societal changes coming from new media.

3. In just a few short decades, today’s teenagers will dominate the American electorate.

From the basis of studying adolescents and political polarization, I got to reading.

I learned that:

While there is a great deal of research on the effects of media consumption on political polarization and significant research on how to influence political depolarization, minimal, if any, research has been done on whether social media political rhetoric can be used to influence affective depolarization among politically socializing adolescents.

— Quoted from the “Gap Analysis” section of my paper

From this gap, I derived my research design and hypothesis:

This gap in the literature is addressed with the current study, a survey experiment designed to find the differing ways political rhetoric on social media can impact affective depolarization among American adolescents. The hypothesis is that teens exposed to civil rhetoric on an ideologically polarized, political social media debate will report a decrease in affective polarization, whereas teens exposed to combative rhetoric in a similar debate will report the opposite.

— Quoted from the “Gap Analysis” section of my paper

I recalled this 2018 episode of the YouTube video journalism series, Strikethrough, that I had first watched in elementary school, when considering the harms of too much political polarization.