Qriously measures sentiment on smartphones

A couple of days ago, President Obama held his state of the union address. This speech is a great indicator for the most burning political issues at the time. News outlets and TV stations across the nation dissect every single word in order to derive insight on the government’s future plans. This time the President’s address is even more important as it strongly influences the hot topics for the upcoming election.

We asked people to rate his talk and Obama scored a 3.1 out of 5 star rating.
We saw an unusually high level of uncertainty when it came to the question of whether people agreed with what the president said and whether it reflected reality – or the actual state of the Union. Particularly on the latter of the two questions

Does Obama’s SOTU Address reflect reality?

A lot of this has to do with the issues Obama talked about in his speech. When looking at a the number of times certain words were used we get an idea about the importance of an issue (source: Reuters). The top three out of this list are “Jobs / The American Worker”, “Taxes / Budget” and “Energy”. We asked people what they thought is the most important political issue right now. Secondly we asked the question again with another topic that got a lot of attention “Healthcare”.

While the majority agrees Jobs and Budget are important, 26% percent stated Healthcare as the top issue, something Obama did not really touch on in his speech. Did Obama give Healthcare the attention it deserved?

We went on to assess Obama’s performance in dealing with these issues. On average he scored approximately 3 out of 5 stars, but digging into the data reveals deeper insights.

Discarding the 30% 5-star ratings of people who generally approve of Obama’s policies, we get a more in-depth view on how people rate the president’s job on certain issues. We get a solid ranking where he performs best on “Job creation” followed by “Healthcare”. The rating for Budget was the lowest out of the three.

The data for these charts is available here in a Google Docs spreadsheet