How do microaggressions alter perceived electability?

Methods

Summary

The survey will be distributed through MTurk. This way it can reach a large number of people in a concise manner. The survey will consist of sliding-scale questions which will be very clear and brief, so that it will be easier to collect and analyze data (Hayes 2013). The survey itself will be fairly succinct with only background questions and one question per each corresponding paragraph (five questions/paragraphs in total). This is because participants are less likely to respond accurately to a longer survey. There will be other questions regarding socioeconomic status as well as race and gender, which will gauge the impact of intersectionality. 

This data could further be split up into the subsections of the demographic questions that were asked. Data could be classified into separate political parties, geographic regions, genders, and races. Within these specific categories, certain similarities may arise which would indicate a strong correlation between these factors and receptiveness to microaggressions. For instance, it could be found that a specific political party’s voting behavior is heavily influenced by microaggressions, and another political party is the opposite. 

After the data is collected, a t-test would be conducted to determine if there was a significant difference in the perceived electability between the two different position descriptions, and an ANOVA test would be conducted on the three different microaggressive descriptions. For example, this would test to see if there was a significant difference in perceived electability between the candidates described with neutral language compared to the candidate described with microaggressive language. This would also test to see if there was a significant difference in perceived electability between the candidate who sought local office compared to national office.  If there was no significant difference, and both candidates were equally electable, then microaggressions clearly didn’t influence the vote. The goal would be to find a statistical significance between the level of microaggressions and the perceived electability of each candidate.