Assessing public sphere influence on political attitudes across generations: a mixed-methods study of generational political structuring in Italy

We present a project investigating the impact of social media on ideological structuring of political attitudes in a generational perspective, with Italy (around the 2024 European Parliament elections) as a case study. We introduce an innovative mixed-methods, sequential, quantitative-driven, multi-stage design combining surveys, qualitative interviews, and social media data, which effectively integrates qualitative and quantitative components to analyze the effect of social media influencers on political attitudes across generations. We present project design along with interaction and integration among components (methodological innovations include a “Swipe” module for respondents–influencers linkage and use of AI for classifying social media posts). We describe individual components (including first empirical results), an intermediate convergent assessment stage, and directions for data analysis.