ABSTRACT

Today’s astonishing level of technological connectivity presents new opportunities for measuring people’s attitudes and obtaining a deeper understanding of opinion formation, ranging from online surveys (Evans & Mathur, 2005) to textual analysis of microblog postings (Lucas et al., 2015). As Maurer and Reinemann (2009) point out, however, when it comes to responses to communicative stimuli, not all measurement methods are equally effective: without continuously measuring responses over the course of a communication event, it is quite difficult to obtain valid data about the causes of opinions and changes to opinions in that event. Methods for real-time response (RTR) measurement help to make progress on the causal question by capturing reactions and making it possible to tie them back to moments within the stimulus, permitting inferences about which aspects of the communication were affecting which people, and in what way.