Strategic techniques for qualitative sampling online
This month, the 10th International Conference on Social Media & Society is taking place in Toronto, Canada. As every year, a substantial part of the conference is dedicated to internet research and digital methods. Innovations of the last few years have led to the creation of a wide range of computational methods that allow researchers to mine social media data. By now, several tools also offer opportunities to qualitative researchers who do not intend to collect extensive network data, for example this year’s methods workshop on Web Historian by Erika Menchen-Trevino.
Even so, digital space remains difficult to study for qualitative researchers. Although digital space has created new research needs through new significant research spaces, the growing digitalisation of everyday life has also exacerbated some of the existing challenges around qualitative internet research: widening participation, the resulting information overload, and the increasing difficulty of finding suitable case studies online. These issues have made meaningful case study sampling for qualitative research (such as online communities and field sites) particularly difficult.
As a way of addressing this issue, my colleague Dr. Paul Reilly and I are presenting our running paper titled “Strategic techniques for qualitative sampling online — a review of social media monitoring tools towards new approaches for qualitative sampling online” at the International Conference on Social Media & Society. In this paper, we offer an evaluation of 7 Social Media Monitoring tools as an option for qualitative researchers (in particular Early Career Researchers) to find more suitable and meaningful spaces. These social media monitoring tools can broadly be described as pathways towards finding out what is being said online on social media, for example about a brand, company or phenomenon (Zhang & Vos, 2014) or ‘analysis tools for tracking and measuring what people are saying (…), or any topic across the web’s social media landscape’ (Batrinca & Treleaven 2015: n.p.). The 7 tools we assess include Google Trends, HowSociable, Buzzsumo, Hashtagify, Socialmention, Keyhole, and Sputtr — both real-time search and web search statistics.
In the presentation, we suggest that these free commercial tools (though not particularly useful for standalone data collection) provide opportunities for researchers to sample suitable online spaces in a way that requires little technical knowledge, very little time dedication (compared to full-scale digital methods research), and, when combined, can produce meaningful starting data such as relevant field sites and starting themes. In doing so, they circumvent, at least in part, some of the ‘digital bias’ that results from analysing particular online environments and therefore limits data to a particular space or demographic (Marres, 2017).
For scholars studying social media communications of climate change, such a sampling approach may be helpful in finding and establishing meaningful online fields for further research, a route we have taken for research as part of the ESRC-funded project Making Climate Social (Principal Investigator: Dr. Warren Pearce). Such research may be particularly beneficial towards the creation of more qualitative research, an area that, according to our systematic review on social media communications of climate change (see Pearce et al., 2019), is currently under-represented.
Suay M. Ozkula is a University Teacher and Post-doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield.
References
Batrinca, B. & Treleaven, P. C. (2015). Social media analytics: a survey of techniques, tools and platforms. AI & Society, 30:1, 89–116. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-014-0549-4
Beddows, E. (2008). The Methodological Issues Associated With Internet-Based Research, International Journal of Emerging Technologies and Society, 6:2, 124–139.
Hine, C. (2015). Ethnography for the Internet: embedded, embodied and everyday. London, England: Bloomsbury Academic.
Marres, N. ( 2017). Digital Sociology. Bristol, England: Polity Press.
Pearce, W., Niederer, S., Özkula, S. M., & Querubín, N. S. (2019). The social media life of climate change: Platforms, publics, and future imaginaries, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 10:2. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.569
Zhang, B. & Vos, M. (2014). Social media monitoring: aims, methods, and challenges for international companies, Corporate Communications: An International Journal, 19:4, 371–383. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/CCIJ-07-2013-0044
