Social Media Research: new methods, challenges and oportunities

An End to the Crisis of Empirical Sociology?, 2016

As social media technologies such as Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube have become highly ubiquitous, social life itself has become reconfigured. Though early notions of an offline/online binary remain in some quarters of social research, there is a realization amongst most that this binary is reified. As such, the study of social interactions within social media is a fundamental sociological question. This chapter argues that social researchers need to engage with the study of social media in order to comprehensively understand modern social life. This chapter also provides insights into how we, as social researchers, can critically collect and discern social formations via social media. Twitter is specifically used in this chapter to provide an example of how the medium provides opportunities for mixed qualitative and quantitative social analysis. Ultimately, this chapter also argues that the understanding of large social questions is increasingly contingent on us deciphering and understanding social knowledge formed and maintained within social media platforms.

This is the first time the world has seen this scale and quality of data about human communication', Marlow says with a characteristically serious gaze before breaking into a smile at the thought of what he can do with the data. For one thing, Marlow is confident that exploring this resource will revolutionize the scientific understanding of why people behave as they do. His team can also help Facebook influence our social behaviour for its own benefit and that of its advertisers. This work may even help Facebook invent entirely new ways to make money.

KI - Künstliche Intelligenz, 2013

This special issue includes papers that show, first, how to make sense of Social Media data, i.e. how to condense, distill, or integrate highly decentralized and dispersed data resulting from human communication, and second, how Social Media contributes to innovation, collaboration, and Collective Intelligence.

PS: Political Science & Politics, volume 46, issue 03: 615-619

"Social networking sites have recently garnered academic attention for their role in fostering democracy and openness in both developed and developing regions. Unfortunately, in political science, this newfound interest has not yet translated into a greater interest in social media as a methodological tool for researchers conducting fieldwork. How has the era of social media influenced the way political scientists conduct their fieldwork? How can researchers make the most of the opportunities offered by social networking sites while abiding by the strict standards of their ethics board? This article highlights the potential in social networking sites for recruiting participants and gathering data and looks at the impact sites such as Facebook have had on building and maintaining trust with research participants. In contrast, it explores how social media may compromise one’s ability to uphold the “do no harm” principle guiding all academic research by jeopardizing participants’ confidentiality and anonymity, a risk deemed especially high for vulnerable populations or sensitive regions. Insight gleaned from the researcher’s own fieldwork in two minority provinces of Indonesia in 2010–2011 is used as a case in point."

Communication Monographs, 2014

The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.

The International Encyclopedia of Gender, Media, and Communication, 2020

The concept of social media has been closely linked to social mediators since the first developments of digital communication. These platforms connect different agents, from ordinary users to state institutions, social movements, and journalists. The characteristics of communication processes enabled by social media are considered as forms of interaction which also generate opinion bubbles. Furthermore, the technical affordances of social media facilitate the circulation of information and the development of deliberative spaces which give visibility to minority groups, allowing the creation and strengthening of identity ties. On the one hand, social media have been beneficial for the denouncement of violence against women or LGBTQ people, especially regarding demands for equality, human rights, and political mobilization. On the other hand, these media are also problematic for minority groups, since they allow the dissemination of information based on prejudice through (sometimes anonymous) comments, which can be radical and violent. Even though they are not a definitive solution for achieving more equality, social media can help to reduce the gap of representation, especially of minorities, and expose people to a larger cross‐section of content.

WP5's overall objective is to analyze the key contextual factors that shape the production of conflictrelated content in social media. It addresses social media as an alternative media environment to professional news media while interacting closely with it. At the same time, WP5 studies how the interactions between various kinds of actors are formed. It aims to provide a better and deeper understanding of how the different actors act, react and interact in times of intensive conflict as well as during attempts of conflict resolution and reconciliation. Using both qualitative as well as quantitative approaches and building on the three main functions of social media that have been discussed in the theoretical working paper, namely as a. direct and interactive communication channels, b. alternative information providers/sources and c. self-organized participatory networks, we approach our research areas through two main research areas, a. conflict-related and b. actor-related.

SAGE Research Methods Foundations, 2020

Beneito-Montagut, R. (in-press). Analyzing multimedia social interactions on social media, Atkinson, P.; et al (Ed.) SAGE Research methods Foundations: An Encyclopedia Analyzing digital social data Introduction Society has become thoroughly mediatised. Every aspect and part of society from the economy, politics and education to civil society and everyday social relations is immersed by media. Today we have the internet, smart phones, apps, social network services, blogs, email, and other social media platforms. Social media has brought changes to the way we inform, communicate with others, learn, play and socialize. Most people are quite well connected and communicate with others and while being connected they obtain, organize, produce and share information on a regular basis. These common routinely activities generate a large amount of information and knowledge of different forms, much of it created by 'ordinary people'. This information is generally referred as digital social data which is potentially of great interest to social scientists (Sloan and Quan-Haase, 2017). From the emergence of the internet, both quantitative and qualitative research have been interested in analysing digital data for its endeavour. As social media have enlarged the size and variety of the traces of social actors' actions and expressions, the analytical possibilities available for social science researchers have been reshaped too. This has brought to the fore the necessity of methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaboration for the study of social media data. Conversely, this digital turn has generated lively debates about its potential to know the contemporary social world. While at the beginning of internet research scholars tended to study social life online as a separated from 'real life', researchers disputed this and argued the need for online social life to be viewed as an integral part of social life (Beneito-Montagut, 2011). Nevertheless, linking social media data to what is going on offline is still one of the challenges of digital social science research. Most of the methodological innovations have been made regarding the analysis of big data and technological tools to make sense of it, but not much has been said about how to qualitatively analyse social media data. This chapter deals with the analysis of social media data and offers a framework which considers the limits and challenges that this kind of data poses. Rather than offering a prescriptive method, it attempts to document the reflective process to incorporate social media data to qualitative research projects considering how we extract meaning from them. So, it is presented as a toolkit to start thinking about the analytical process instead of a universally applicable model. The aim is to link the analysis of social media data to well-stablished research paradigms, instead of reinventing them. Modes and media. Multimodality and multimediality The first section brings some definitions to set together the differences and common grounds of two terms: multimodal and multimedia. We will also put these two concepts in relation to the digital context and explain the reasons why we use multimedia. Yet suggesting multimodal research as a useful analytical framework to analyse social media data. We first define modes and media. Modes are ways of representing information −the semiotic means used to compose a text. Note that text is understood, in a wider sense, as any socio-cultural artefact or act that embeds communication. Examples of modes comprise words, sounds, still and moving images, animation and colour (see Bella Dicks' chapter). Media, on the other hand, are the tools and material resources used to produce and disseminate texts. Media are technologies, channels, practices and platforms which we use to disseminate share, obtain, store, organize and create information about the world around us through communication and interaction. Examples of media, both broad and narrow casting, include books, radio, television, computers, smartphones, paint brush and canvas, and the body. The internet and digital tools are usually referred as digital media. 1 Hence, although media and modes are different and independent of each other, the media used affects the ways in which meaning can be realized through modes-or each media affords certain possibilities for communication or action. Accordingly, these concepts are independent and interdependent from each other at the same time. A multimodal text is characterized by the use of several different modes. In multimodal research, communication and representation is more than language, it refers to semiotic approaches as in the analysis of colour, shape, image, gestures and gazes in communicative situations. It assumes that our languages and their modes (written, oral, visual, gestural) attach meanings (semantic, symbolic and affective) and are world making. Its major influence comes from social semiotics. Multimodal analytical approaches have provided concepts, methods and a framework for the analysis of multimodal data. 1 Also, they used to be called new media.

Web 2.0 at least from two perspectives: either to better understand this medium as research object, or to collect data on different topics. Social media can be a tremendous data source and topics for researchers. At the same time, these data are found in multimedia formats on different platforms, are updated continuously, and could be posted by professionals or users. This situation requires different solutions for data analysis. The objective of this paper is to show what metrics, measurements, methods and tools are used for by researchers to study and analyze online digital media, in their work with academic purposes. The concern of this paper is to show which research methods are used for social and digital media analysis and which data, metrics and measures are considered as basis of the analysis. Case studies in this paper refer to scientific articles dealing with social media research in online media and communication studies. Findings of this paper show the specificity and trends in media and communication researches related with social and digital media, and relative to economic and social needs. The conclusion that emerges from this paper is that research on and about the Web 2.0 invents or redefines traditional methods and tools, or adopts new ones.

Social media have been one of the biggest success stories on the Internet, as sites like Facebook and Twitter have gone from zero users to more than 1 billion users in less than a decade. Yet the phenomenon of social media still lacks a coherent body of theory. In spite of their ubiquity, social media are still an essentially nascent communication media. On the one hand, social media and the Internet, like all media, have been informed by rhetoric, mass media, and computer and information theories (cf. Brand, 1988; Burnham, 1984; Kent, 2001; McLuhan, 1964/1999; Postman, 1984, 1993; Taylor & Kent, 2010; Vallee, 1982). However, on the other hand, social media are a completely new phenomenon that goes beyond the established broadcast media and should be informed by their own unique theories (cf. Kent, 2001). This special issue opens that conversation, theorizing about new possibilities and considering novel approaches to the study of social media.