Investigating social media (or using it as a research method) is not that easy. You can encounter various obstacles. We conducted research in which, using various case studies, we investigated the role social media play in the development of incidents and how social unrest arises and is influenced by this.
We conducted the research into the influence of social media on situations of social unrest on behalf of the research program Police & Science. The report of this research (PDF) was published on June 12, 2013.
This article does not, however, discuss the conclusions of this report, but the (im)possibilities of social media as a subject of research. Because during this research and several other studies, we have gained a lot of experience with it, which we would like to share.
Online data collection
first-aid-kit-62643The Internet offers more and more possibilities for interactive data collection. Many respondents can be reached quickly and relatively easily via the web, and social media reinforce this. That is great, but not everyone uses the internet. When all respondents in a study are approached via the internet (including social media), this has consequences for the population to which generalisation can be made.
This does not have to be a problem, as it depends on the goal and problem definition of the research. For a research we conducted on the use of social media in emergency situations , respondents were approached via social media, online newsletters and websites. The research results give an indication of the expectations regarding this topic of citizens who use social media and not of the entire Dutch population. This limitation must be taken into account when interpreting the research results.
WhatsappAn important limitation when you want to include switzerland mobile phone number data social media in a research is that not all messages that may be relevant to your research are visible. The main reason for this is that not everything is public on social media. Think for example of the closed sites at Facebook and the shielded accounts on Twitter. Also do not forget other possibilities to stay in touch with each other, such as WhatsApp and pinging via BlackBerrys.
In addition, not all information is easy to find. In our research into social media and social unrest, only messages that surfaced based on search terms and hashtags were included in the analysis. All messages without these search terms were therefore outside the scope of this research.
You can't properly estimate the impact
The inability to properly estimate the impact of social media messages is another limitation. 6,000 tweets about a certain incident can have more impact than 500,000 tweets about another incident. This is partly because it is not possible to see who has read which tweets. The number of messages found about the incidents says nothing about the impact of these messages.
project_x_wallpaper_by_lilgamerboy14-d5i8x76An example is a tweet from a teenager in Hoorn, in which he calls for a Project X party. The tweet had an effect, despite the fact that the message was not widely distributed. The impact of social media messages depends on several factors, such as the number of followers of an account, the number of visitors to a website and how often the message is linked to other websites. Another element is the reach of a tweet. For example, Twitter users can forward tweets to others. The reach of a tweet is increased in this way, but this is not visible when monitoring social media.