Using Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience for Hard-to-Survey Populations

Abstract

Some populations are difficult to survey. This poses a problem for researchers who want to understand what issues matter to these populations and how the salience of those concerns varies over time. In this visualization article, the authors illustrate how Google Trends can be used to examine issue salience for hard-to-survey mass populations. Applying this method to immigrant concerns over deportation, the authors show that anxieties over removal increased in response to (potential) policy changes, such as Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (Senate Bill 1070) and the immigration policies that were considered in the wake of Donald Trump’s election.

Keywords

survey research immigration measurement construct validity

Some populations are difficult to survey (Tourangeau et al. 2014). They might be difficult to access, such as political elites or transient persons, or difficult to identify, such as individuals who engage in illicit activities. Whatever the reason, this poses a problem for researchers who want to understand what issues matter to these populations and how the salience of those concerns varies over time.

We illustrate how scholars might measure issue salience for hard-to-survey mass populations using publicly available data on Google searches. Google Trends provides data on search queries from 2004 to the present. These data are normalized by the total number of searches in a specified geography (e.g., the United States) and the specified time range (e.g., 2010–2017). The Supplementary Appendix describes how researchers can obtain these data.¹

As an example of how these data can be used, we display in Figure 1 the frequency of Google searches for “will i be deported” in the United States from January 1, 2010, to December 1, 2017.² Presumably only individuals who worry about personally being deported—those who are not citizens—include the personal pronoun “I” in their searches. So we interpret these data as a measure of how salient deportation concerns are to immigrants. To be clear, we cannot identify from the search data exactly who is querying for specific phrases; whereas we do not think that this is an issue here, it may be for other phrases.

Figure 1.

Salience over Time (2010–2017).

Although we think that this measure has face validity, we further assess its construct validity (i.e., how well it measures the underlying theoretical construct). Specifically, we check the measure’s convergent validity, or the extent to which it correlates with plausibly related phenomena (Trochim and Donnelly 2001), by seeing if search frequencies peak with (potential) immigration policy changes. The logic is that the salience of deportation concerns for immigrants should increase when the government is (considering) changing immigration laws.³ To examine this, we mark the five highest search frequencies in the top panel with gray lines. We find that searches increased in months marked by significant political changes that could, or did, influence immigration policy. The highest peak happened shortly after President Trump signed the “Muslim ban,” the second highest occurred when Trump was elected, the third highest coincided with Trump’s inauguration, and the fourth highest occurred during legal hearings about the Muslim ban. The fifth highest peak happened when Arizona’s Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (i.e., Senate Bill 1070) was scheduled to go into effect and when other states were considering copycat legislation. Senate Bill 1070 allowed police officers to investigate whether stopped, detained, or arrested individuals were authorized to stay in the country (Morse, 2011).

In sum, we illustrate how Google Trends can be used to examine issue salience for hard-to-survey populations. Applying this method to immigrant deportation concerns, we show that anxieties over removal increased in response to (potential) policy changes.

Supplemental Material

SRD760414_ONLINE_APPENDICES – Supplemental material for Using Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience for Hard-to-Survey Populations

Supplemental material, SRD760414_ONLINE_APPENDICES for Using Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience for Hard-to-Survey Populations by Volha Chykina and Charles Crabtree in Socius

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan.

Authors’ Note

The code necessary to replicate our results is included in the Supplementary Appendix.

Notes

Author Biographies

Volha Chykina is a PhD candidate in the Department of Education Policy Studies at the Pennsylvania State University and a visiting scholar with the Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan. Her research examines how educational outcomes of immigrant and minority students are affected by different characteristics of the communities that they reside in. She is also interested in how the characteristics of educational systems influence achievement, attainment, and educational expectations of minority youth across countries.

Charles Crabtree is a PhD candidate in the Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan. His substantive research focuses on various aspects of repression and discrimination in comparative, American, and international politics. Methodologically, he is interested in research design and experiments. He has published work on these topics at the British Journal of Political Science, Conflict Management and Peace Science, Electoral Studies, International Studies Quarterly, the Journal of Experimental Political Science, the Journal of Peace Research, Political Research Quarterly, Political Science Research and Methods, Political Analysis, PS: Political Science & Politics, Research & Politics, and in several other interdisciplinary, sociology, and psychology journals.

References

Gross

Neil

Mann

Marcus

. 2017. “Is There a ‘Ferguson Effect’? Google Searches, Concern about Police Violence, and Crime in US Cities, 2014–2016.” Socius. Retrieved February 10, 2018 (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2378023117703122).

Morse

Ann

. 2011. “Arizona’s Immigration Enforcement Laws.” Retrieved February 10, 2018 (httphttp://www.ncsl.org/research/immigration/analysis-of-arizonas-immigration-%20law.aspx).

Tourangeau

Edwards

Johnson

Wolter

Bates

, eds. 2014. Hard-to-survey Populations. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Trochim

William M. K.

Donnelly

James P.

2001. The Research Methods Knowledge Base. New York: Thomson.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

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For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

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