Political Perspectives in Singapore
A group project using logistic regression on Pew Research survey data to see how internet access in Singapore relates to social media use and to opinions of the US and China.
Why Singapore
Singapore is a useful case: 6 million people in 720 square kilometers, about 70% ethnically Chinese, with real economic ties to both the US and China. For a group project in MATH 309 (SAS and Data Management at JMU), four of us ran logistic regression on Pew Research's 2022 Global Attitudes Survey — 1,000 Singaporean respondents — to test three questions about internet access: whether it tracks with social media use and political news spread, whether it tracks with favorability toward the US, and whether Singaporean opinions of China track with the broader China-Singapore relationship.
Weak models, still telling results
None of the three models were strong predictors on their own — concordance ranged from 29% to 60%, and most predictors we picked weren't statistically significant. But a few signals held up: people who thought the social media enables manipulation were less likely to have internet access, people who approved of the US Afghanistan withdrawal were more likely to, and confidence in Xi Jinping was the one significant predictor of views on the China-Singapore relationship. The bigger lesson was in the misses — with better variable selection (political ideology, income, age) the models would likely have told a clearer story.