Project review: Postmaterialism and political trust

[juliaquach02]

Dear @crudi3,

thank you for your project description! It is surely important to get a better understanding of populism and its relation to materialistic and post-materialistic mindsets!

To begin with, I have some questions to make sure that I understood the background and project idea correctly:

• I think I got an idea what materialism, post-materialism, and the Inglehart Index is (referring to https://search.gesis.org/variables/exploredata-ZA3762_VarV187 ) but I do not know yet what the “cultural backlash hypothesis” is. Could you explain a little more about this hypothesis?

• In the project description, it says “Since populism involves a certain amount of disagreement with the established political culture, political trust should also be affected by materialistic/postmaterialistic values of individuals.” I don’t understand yet how the former relates to the latter phenomenon. Could you elaborate a little about it?

Regarding the data set:

• I did not find any data set in your project folder and the link in the project description to a data set on the website https://search.gesis.org/research_data/ZA5280 requires a registration. Would it be possible that you push your data set into your project folder on GitHub?

Regarding the project goal:

• The goal is to “visualize the average trust levels of different institutions according to their materialistic/postmaterialistic value system”. What kind of institutions do we compare? (This is probably clearer once I have access to the data set).
• The colours should be used to label different groups of post-/materialism. Could you tell me a little more about the different groups? Are people interviewed and grouped by their level of post-/materialism? (This is probably also clearer once I have access to the data set).

Regarding the visualization goal, I would like to make sure that I understood the instructions correctly. The project aims for a bar plot with the following characteristics:

• For the first option:

• Each bar represents one institution.
• The y-axis represents the mean trust level.

• The colors within the bars represent the proportion of different groups within all respondents for the respective institution. For the groups, the respondents were grouped by their Inglehart index. The Inglehart index represents the post-/materialistic mindset of the respondents. (And groups with the same Inglehart index should get the same color for the bars represented in the other institutions.) --> I am not sure whether I understood the desired color coding correctly. Could you please confirm?

  • For the second option:

  • It was written “Give each institution a definitve color and changeing the hue for post-/materialsitic groups (like a more frosted colorversion for materialism and more radiant one for postmateralism)”. Does it mean that each bar should only have one colour shade which represents an average of the Inglehart-Index across all respondents for this institution? And then, a legend should be added to the graph that explains how the colour shade encodes the average Inglehart-Index for that institution?
  • It was written that the “average trust level irrespectible of post-/materialism as a number within each bar” should be included in the bar. Does it mean you would like to add the exact y-value to each bar as in the example graph?

  • “Highlight the biggest and smallest difference between the post-/materialistics groups”. I am not sure which difference is meant. Do you want to compare the Inglehart index of post-/materialistics groups within the respondents for one institution or for all institutions pooled together?

To put it in a nutshell, it would be great,

• If you explain a little more about the background (just for my understanding)
• If I get access to the data set
• If you give feedback whether I understood the visualization goals correctly

I am looking forward to learning more about research questions in social sciences!

Best, Julia

[martin-raden]

Hi @crudi3 ,

thanks for the nice project. Here some comments from my side.

• [ ] yes, please add the data set to the github repo to avoid additional registration etc.
• [ ] also name the important information from the data set and maybe show some lines within the project description, to provide an easier understanding of the available data without need for data import etc. before starting the project.
• [ ] you might extend the "goal" section of the description with some questions you would like to answer with the plots. Or some hypothesis you would like to test given the visualization. This helps to keep the overall goal in sight.
• [ ] do some spellchecking. There are a couple of typos around.. ;)

Looks good! Best, Martin