Hello and welcome to our webtext!

Our research question focuses on how experience with reading and writing as a child influences one’s current political knowledge and party alignment in order to understand if fluency in literacy is correlated to particular world perspectives. In other words, we want to understand how the prominent mediums through which we communicate affect our perception of society (world matters).This question is extremely relevant in today’s political atmosphere; many have taken to insulting those of opposing political ideologies by calling them uneducated or misinformed. We wanted to gather quantitative data to either support or refute this idea, and perhaps create a credible argument as to why literacy is important. Our prediction was that a strong background in reading/writing would come from respondents who identified as liberal and had significant political knowledge. However, our prediction is merely a reflection of our own experiences and biases, so we’re eager to see if the data we collect aligns with our preconceived notions of politics and literacy.

McKenna Haney and Erika Singh-Cundy are the researchers for this project. They are both freshmen at Western Washington University. Their hopes for this page are that it’s easy to navigate and informative. There will be multiple sections describing each step of the research process, as well as a fun little quiz about politics!