Dr Rosalynd Southern MSc / PhD (Manchester)

Rosalynd’s research focuses on online political communication, particularly during election campaigns in the UK. She has a PhD in Social Statistics from the Cathie Marsh Institute at the University of Manchester entitled ‘Politics as Usual? Measuring and Explaining the Extent and Content of Online Campaigning by Major and Minor Party Candidates at the 2010 UK General Election'. The thesis used original data focusing on candidate's local-level use of websites, social media and email during the campaign. This provided the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of local-level online campaigning in the UK at that time.

For her post-doctoral work, (also at the University of Manchester) Rosalynd repeated the work done for her PhD for the 2015 UK general election to begin to build a longitudinal picture of online campaigning in the UK. She was also involved in the 2015 British Election Study on the iBES project, which is the internet module of the study. This assessed voters’ use of social media during the election campaign. She furthermore collaborated on projects with the Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory team in Cardiff on Big Data projects, including predicting the 2015 general election results from Twitter data, and an analysis of the Comparative Survey of Electoral Systems to assess online political contact and online mobilisation. She plans to continue this work by bidding for funds to repeat and refine such work at future elections.

As well as teaching research methods on the MA Politics and Media course, Rosalynd will teach a second year module called Social Media Data Analysis and a third year module called Campaigning and Media.