The Public Opinion Lab is a state-of-the-art social media analytics lab designed for conducting cutting-edge industry and academic research on the ever-evolving social media ecosystem. Collaborating with corporate and governmental partners, the POL combines communication expertise with advanced social media data analytics to provide practical insights into contemporary issues. The POL is housed in the Institute for Communication & Information Research of the College of Communication & Information Science at the University of Alabama.
ICORIA Best Paper!: In the first Public Opinion Lab – Health Communication & Biometrics Lab collaboration, Dr. Steven Holiday, Dr. Jameson Hayes, Haseon Park, Yuanwei Lyu, and Yang “Josie” Zhou won Best Paper at the International Conference on Research in Advertising (ICORIA) in Prague, Czech Republic. Their paper entitled “”Consumer-brand engagement and social media influencers: A discrete emotion perspective on influencer marketing strategy using facial expression and linguistic analysis” integrate data collection and computational text analysis in the POL with facial expression analysis in the HCBL.
Beach Happy Study 2022: The Public Opinion Lab and lifestyle brand 30A collaborate on the inaugural Beach Happy Study, a national study of travel and happiness in the U.S. The whitepaper can be downloaded here.
POL Workshops are designed to help CCIS faculty and students conduct impactful research using the cutting-edge tools made available in the lab. Workshops will walk participants through different approaches to collecting and analyzing data and incorporate hands-on elements to help plan their studies. POL Workshops will be held on the dates below from 2 – 4 P.M.
2/28/2024 LIWC 22: A computational textual analysis software for accessing over 30 psychometric variables (Sign Up!)
3/27/2024 Leximancer : A computational textual analysis tool that can analyze large text corpuses generating customizable concept maps(Sign Up!)
Monday: 10:00 – 12:00 pm
Tuesday: 10:00 – 12:00 pm
Thursday: 10:00 – 12:00 pm
Friday: 10:00 – 12:00 pm*
Location: 470 Reese Phifer Hall
*Friday lab hours will be group trainings. Sprinklr and CrowdTangle trainings will take place from 10 – 11 am. Leximancer and LIWC trainings will take place from 11 – noon.
Though the lab is open during lab hours, appointments are strongly recommended to ensure availability of lab personnel, equipment and software as the lab can sometimes be quite in demand.
For lab and training requests, please visit the Academic Collaborations page and complete a POL Request.
For all other inquiries, please contact us as puboplab@ua.edu.
