Connectify: Empowering informed choices
Posted on Tuesday, July 25th, 2023
Our project started with Elections Canada, an independent and non-partisan agency that ensures fairness in elections, bringing an issue of lack of trust among Canadians in their organization and the electoral process. The purpose of this project was to research factors that may be causing lack of trust and how we can increase Canadians’ trust in elections. This topic was broken down into four different themes. Our team’s theme was: What external factors and experiences impact Canadians’ perceptions of democracy?
We first narrowed our research theme to a specific demographic. Our demographic was new Canadian citizens, however due to recruitment limitations, our demographic broadened to naturalised Canadian citizens; citizens who were not born in Canada but migrated. This demographic was found to have a low voter turnout.
To understand external factors and experiences impacting our demographic’s perceptions, we conducted secondary research. This led us to break down our main theme into four sub-questions to categorise the external factors, providing structure for our primary research. They are:
– How do previous experiences with politics in their home countries impact the perception of democracy among new citizens?
– How does the language barrier impact the engagement of new citizens in the democratic process?
– What factors motivate Canadians to engage in politics?
– What level of familiarity/knowledge do new citizens have with the political system of Canada?
To recruit participants for our study, we employed various strategies: reaching out to personal contacts, social media platforms, and sending emails to professionals and organizations related to elections and immigrant support. To collect data, we conducted a mixed methods approach approved by the Algonquin College Research Ethics Board (REB). It involved the execution of an online questionnaire (quantitative data) and conducting semi-structured interviews with the participants and Subject Matter Experts (qualitative data). We received a total number of 44 survey responses, 11 participant interviews, and 6 SME interviews. The interviews gave us deeper insights as to why participants selected a certain answer, such why they feel it’s hard to find information. The SMEs provided us with information on how they interact with our demographic, giving us insights on where they maybe gaps in current services. We analyzed the data and came up with key insights that helped inform the design process.
We learned from our research that a huge factor that impacted our demographic was finding information on the political system, elections, and the voting process. When they were newcomers, they found they were having issues with feeling a sense of belonging and integration into Canadian society. This led us to build a digital platform providing political and voting information that is quick and easy to understand, visually appealing, fun, interactive, and placed in areas where our demographic comes together to feel a sense of belonging. By the end of their exposure with this platform, the participants will be more aware of Elections Canada’s role in the voting process and the political system in Canada.