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Facebook is the dominant social networking platform in the United States. This presentation offers a new method for conducting experiments within existing Facebook networks, without the express participation of Facebook itself. The theoretical rationale for this method is discussed, and four experiments are presented that use the method to explore the effects of social networks on political behaviors and attitudes.

Bio:
Katherine Haenschen is a postdoctoral research associate at CITP. Her research explores the intersection of digital media and political participation and has a specific focus in how online interactions influence offline and online behaviors. She has developed new methods to conduct field experiments within online networks, and she is currently working on a project to compare self-reported survey answers with digital records of online activity.

Haenschen is also appointed as a visiting scholar at the Annette Strauss Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has been published in the Journal of Communication and presented at leading conferences in communication and political science. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and previously graduated from the University of Chicago and Columbia University.