Authors

• Helin, Tiina (Tampere University)

Keywords

ideologies, political attitudes, political participation, social networks, students, voting, voting behaviour

Abstract

This dataset consists of 12 texts written by social research students at Tampere University on their voting behaviour and the formation of their political opinions. The data were originally collected for a Bachelor's thesis.

In the writing guidelines, the respondents were presented with questions to help guide their writing. The questions prompted the students to describe, for instance, the political topics they usually discussed with their fellow students and the kind of effect these conversations had had on their political opinions and voting behaviour. Additionally, the students were asked to describe how strong their own political party preference had been before starting their studies and whether their studies had affected their preference. The guidelines also instructed the students to write about the influence of their childhood home environment on their political ideology and behaviour.

Background information included the respondent's gender, age group and voting behaviour during the previous parliamentary elections. The data were organised into an easy to use HTML version at FSD.

The dataset is only available in Finnish.