Laura Silver is a senior researcher at Pew Research Center. She is an expert in international survey research and writes about international public opinion on a variety of topics, including media usage and partisanship in Europe, Chinese public opinion, and global attitudes toward China. She is involved in all aspects of the research process, including designing survey questionnaires and sample designs, managing fieldwork, processing and analyzing data, and writing reports. Prior to joining Pew Research Center, she was a foreign affairs research analyst at the U.S. Department of State in the Office of Opinion Research where she designed and implemented surveys in multiple countries in East Asia. She received a dual Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication and the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania where her work focused on American public opinion of China, particularly in the context of presidential elections. Her work has been published in journals such as the International Journal of Public Opinion Research and International Studies Quarterly.
Smartphone users in emerging economies – especially those who use social media – tend to be more exposed to people with different backgrounds and more connected with friends they don’t see in person.
