From quantitative measurement to understanding public demand: Exploring non-survey methods in applied regional research

The article builds on the well-developed problem of studying trust in society towards social institutions, as well as between individuals. Currently, contact quantitative sociology faces a number of challenges, and the level of consent to participate in surveys is steadily falling. In order to reliably assess public opinion, non-contact tools for studying the digital environment are already required. The application of non-survey techniques for collecting big data using a pre-formed thesaurus allows us to select data for analysis and circumvent the problems associated with respondent recruitment. The application of SML approach to analyze digital publications of Russian-speaking users from Novosibirsk (more than 450 thousand publications) collected in 2020 has been considered. The combination of quantitative and qualitative methods allowed us to describe the audience and categorize the areas of public distrust and dissatisfaction. The application of this approach can be useful for managerial tasks aimed at increasing trust in society. Thus, the study is a valuable contribution to the development of modern sociology and its applied aspects.

1. Belokoneva S.Yu., Levina E.V. Trust of the Population and Elites in Power: Theoretical and Applied Aspects. Humanities and Social Sciences. Bulletin of the Financial University. 2021;11(6):39–45. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.26794/2226-7867-2021-11-6-39-45

2. Blumenthal M., Clement S., Clinton J. et al. An Evaluation of the 2016 Election Polls in the United States. Public Opinion Quarterly. 2018;82(1):1–33.

3. Brodovskaya E.V., Dombrovskaya A.Yu., Karzubov D.N. et al. Developing methodology for “smart” search for political process markers in social media. Monitoring of Public Opinion: Economic and Social Changes. 2017;5:79–104. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.14515/monitoring.2017.5.06

4. Chimiris E.S. Power Legitimacy: Towards the Creation of an Operational Model. Humanities and Social Sciences. Bulletin of the Financial University. 2020;10(3):37–44. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.26794/2226-7867-2020-10-3-37-44

5. Coleman J. Social and human capital. Social sciences and modernity. 2001;3:121–139. (In Russian).

6. Crouch K. Post-democracy. Moscow: Higher School of Economics Publ. House; 2010. 50 p. (In Russian).

7. Dasgupta P. Trust as a commodity. In: Gambetta D. (ed.). Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell; 1988. Pp. 49–72.

8. Enns P., Lagodny J., Schuldt J. Understanding the 2016 US Presidential Polls: The Importance of Hidden Trump Supporters. The journal Statistics, Politics and Policy; 2017. https://doi.org/10.1515/spp-2017-0003

9. Expert Institute for Social Research. Pandemic and trust on the global dynamics of political ratings and COVID-19 waves. 2021. 6 p. (In Russian).

10. Fukuyama F. Trust: Social virtues and the path to prosperity. Moscow: AST; 1995. 730 p. (In Russian). Gambetta D. Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations. Oxford: Basil Blackwel; 1988. 246 p.

11. Giddens A. Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics. Cambridge: Polity Press; 1994. 280 p. Granovetter M. Economic action and social structure: the problem of embeddedness. American Journal of Sociology. 1895;91:481–510.

12. Granovetter M. Strength of weak ties. Psychological sociology. 2009;10(4):31–50. (In Russian).

13. Greaves M., Oldfield L., Von Randow M., Sibley C. et al. How low can we go? Declining survey response rates to New Zealand electoral roll mail surveys over three decades. Political Science. 2021;3:228–244. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00323187.2021.1898995

14. Hirschman A. Exit, voice, and the state. World Politics: A Quarterly Journal of International Relations. 1978;31(1):90–107.

15. Hirschman A. Exit, voice, and loyalty: Responses to decline in firms, organizations, and states. Harvard University Press: Cambridge; 1970. 176 p.

16. Jemielniak D. Thick Big Data: Doing Digital Social Sciences. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2020. 173 p.

17. Luhman N. Trust and Power. The Academy of Management Journal. 1995;38(1):24–59 p.

18. Mikolov T., Sutskever I., Chen K. et al. Distributed representations of words and phrases and their compositionality. Advances in neural information processing systems. 2013. 3111–3119 p.

19. Misirlis N., Vlachopoulou M. Social media metrics and analytics in marketing – S3M: A mapping literature review. International Journal of Information Management. 2018;38(1):270–276 p.

20. Murphy J., Link M., Childs J., Tesfaye C. et al. Social Media in Public Opinion Research. American Association for Public Opinion Research. 2014;78(4). http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/poq/nfu053

21. Norris P. Cancel Culture: Myth or reality? Political Studies; 2021. Norris P. Closed Minds? Is a “Cancel Culture” Stifling Academic Freedom and Intellectual Debate in Political Science? Cambridge: Harvard Kennedy School; 2020.

22. Papakostas A. Civilized public sphere formation: Distrust, trust and corruption. Moscow: VCIOM; 2016. 224 p. (In Russian).

23. Przeworski A. Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1991. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139172493

24. Putnam R. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1993. 285 p.

25. Putnam R. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall; 1976. 242 p.

26. Rawls J. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1971;19:65–80.

27. Rosanvallon P. Counter-Democracy: Politics in an Age of Distrust. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2008. 350 p. https://doi.org/10.1017/ CBO9780511755835

28. Seligman A. The Problem of Trust. Princeton: Princeton University Press; 1997. 240 p.

29. Shapiro S. The social control of impersonal trust. American Journal of Sociology. 1987;93(3):623–658 p.

30. Sokolov B.O., Zavadskaya M.A., Soboleva N.E. et al. Values in crisis: sociology of coronavirus. Scientific Digest no. 2. Higher School of Economics; 2021. 15 p. (In Russian).

31. Sztompka P. Trust: The missing resource of post-communist society. Krakow: Mimeo, Institute of Sociology, Jagiellonian University; 1995. Urbinati N. Distorted democracy. Opinion, truth and people. Moscow: Gaidar Institute Publ. House; 2016. 448 p. (In Russian).

32. Van Reybrouck D. Against elections. Moscow: Ad Marginem; 2018. 119 p. (In Russian).

33. Veselov Yu.V., Skvortsov N.G. Trust in the age of digital transformations: a sociological study. 2021;6:57–68. (In Russian). https://doi.org/10.31857/ S013216250012556-4

34. Williamson O. Calculativeness, trust, and economic organization. Journal of Law and Economics. 1993;36(2):453–486.