Aug

4

Social Networking Sites & Research

August 4, 2010 | posted by Ryan |

Have you considered conducting research on a social networking site, such as Facebook or MySpace? Ongoing dialogue within the research community has weighed the pros and cons, ups and downs, to see if collecting data through these sites allows for an adequate sample selection of the general population. For example, Eszter Hargittai from Northwestern University posits that the use of networking sites is mitigated by gender, race and ethnicity, and parental education level according to her 2007 article Whose Space? Differences Among Users and Non-Users of Social Network Sites. However, considering the rapid growth of networking sites, in particular Facebook, might the use of SNS become more diverse, more representative of the general population?

For example, in 2009 we started seeing articles describing how use of Facebook had “doubled over the past 60 days” or how in the past year Facebook as grown by 145% among users in the United States (from 20 million in 2007 to over 103 million in January of 2010). By July 2010 US users had exceeded 125 million, while newspapers reported that the total user base had exceeded 500 million users worldwide. Facebook, and SNS, growth exceed everyone’s expectations. The question remains, is this a viable area for recruiting participants for research?

I would side on the positive. My own experience with recruiting participants online has convinced me that for some types of research, recruiting online is hugely beneficial. I was looking for a global sample of individuals who had a particular type of life experience. I ran an add on Facebook, and within one month had over 2 million “impressions” go out to the public, with 1, 073 people clicking on my add, all for $211. Slightly over half of my participants lived in India, a population I could never have reached with so little funding (and a typical faculty researcher’s budget). Additional respondents hailed from Australia, Canada, Mexico, Nigeria, South Africa, and the Ukraine, in addition to my US participants. Undoubtedly SNS allows for contact with a much broader group of individuals, and in my opinion this completely changes the game, as it were, for social scientists conducting research.

For more information on SNS and research based on networking sites, I encourage you to visit the bibliography at http://www.danah.org/researchBibs/sns.php. It seems to be updated regularly and offers a large variety of research chapters & articles.

[Posted in General Interest & Research & Technology]



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