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Author: Kourtney Thompson | Major: Political Science | Semester: Spring 2024

During my third class with Dr. Burcu Bayram, International Law and Politics, she told us about a survey she had done that explored the reasons for Americans’ attitudes towards refugees. When I attended her office hours the following week we discussed her research and decided it would be perfect for my honors thesis. Dr. Bayram’s Political Psychology and International Law and Politics classes were my favorite classes I took during my undergraduate career. This research perfectly combined both of those topics and I was ecstatic to get started on my research. However, Dr. Bayram was going on off-campus assignment the next year and Dr. William Schreckhise agreed to be my thesis mentor.

I began my research by performing an in depth literature review, guided by the authors who inspired Dr. Bayram’s survey like Claire Adida and Lo Adeline. I was able to break down the current research into two major categories of what impacts Americans’ attitude towards refugees the characteristics of the refugees and the way the refugees are framed to Americans. This research guided the statistical analysis I performed on Dr. Bayram’s data. In her survey, she had a control group and an experimental group. 500 participants were randomly assigned to each group and asked questions regarding their attitudes towards refugees. The experiment group was given a prompt reminding them of America’s reputation of being a welcoming nation. I hypothesized that this frame would have a significant impact on Americans’ attitude due to the findings of my literature review.

I had no trouble performing my literature review. It came very naturally to me. However, when it came time to perform the statistical analysis on the survey, I was in uncharted territory. My mentor, Dr. Scheckhise explained to me that there were various different programs I could use to perform this analysis – Strata, R- Studio, and SPSS. I had very limited prior experience with all of these programs as well as statistical analysis in General. I attempted to navigate each of the programs and struggled. I couldn’t even get some of them to run on my personal computer. With the guidance of Dr. Schreckhise and Kelly Copeland, the helpful man who worked at the Union Tech Help Center, I was able to successfully use SPSS to perform a chi squared test and Ordinary Least Squares Regression on Dr. Bayram’s Survey data.

After finally figuring out the best statistical program for me I was able to perform statistical analysis. The analysis found the reputation treatment to not have an effect on the Refugee Acceptance variable, as that variable does not reach standard levels of statistical significance. Therefore, I rejected my hypothesis, that the subjects exposed to the treatment effect will be more likely to support the acceptance of refugees. Although the reputation treatment was found to have no significant effect, I found that ideology and education are better predictors for American attitudes than whether or not a respondent was given the additional prompt, as these factors did reach a statistical significance. Therefore, we find that efforts to influence American attitudes towards refugee acceptance must start in our education systems.