Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?

This project was done in collaboration with Miguel Paz and Laurie Penny.

The issue that we chose to focus on was suggested by Laurie, who had a strong interest in the topic. We focused on the fallacies that the incumbent Conservative party in Britain have been stating in order to paint the last 5 years of their governance in a positive light as elections loom. We wanted to combat these statements by showing how policies enacted in the last several years have actually made many people’s lives worse off, except for those in the top percentages.

We wished to make the presentation interactive to allow users to take a part in shaping the information they receive, which may make them more receptive to the information that is presented. We also strove to frame the quiz at the outset in a neutral way. We added interactivity by building a quiz that asks the user about their circumstances. The answer to the question “Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?” depends on the circumstances that a user puts in. We didn’t have time to completely finish the quiz as of this post, so many pertinent questions are currently omitted and the answers are only partially written. Ideally, we would also have a meta-analysis at the bottom that allows you to quickly see how your results compare to other people’s results.

The quiz is available here: http://people.csail.mit.edu/axz/quizlet/quiz.html

It is written using HTML, CSS, and Javascript. The code is available here: https://github.com/amyxzhang/quizlet

3 thoughts on “Have the last five years been a recovery or crisis?

  1. Amy, Miguel, Laurie – a quiz is a really interesting format for this assignment. Initially I thought a quiz might not be the most persuasive way of delivering your facts (probably because quizzes mostly remind me of entertainment articles these days), but the design of yours is very solemn and persuasive. It does a great job of making larger facts feel personally relevant, which is one of the things that makes this so successful. Nicely done!

  2. Interesting! We were thinking along similar lines, it seems. I like the way you used personal aspects to customize your argument to the user. Looking forward to discussing this with y’all.

  3. Love the format, not sure of methodology and premise. If premise is fthat most are not as well off … Does that mean the experiment already has assumption it hopes to prove? Also are the answers supposed to make me compare myself? Overall much more inventive and engaging than I could have come up with, by far, just asking what assumptions were at outset. We all have assumptions or a point of view so I don’t mean this to be holier than thou. Just asking. Well done.

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