New Tools: Using Social Media in a Research Capacity

Sunday M. Moulton

New Tools: Using Social Media in a Research Capacity

Abstract

In the past decade, social media sites, particularly Facebook,

experienced exponential growth in their user-base, worldwide. As of

2012, the estimated users of Facebook number nearly one billion

according to Miniwatts Marketing Group (2013), and span all seven

continents. These new technologies, linking diverse groups together

and creating a nearly instant transmission of information, create new

social spheres and provide fertile ground for social movements and

revolutions. Anthropologists are asking vital questions: What is

social media? What are these new communities? How are these online

movements generated? However, many social scientists look to social

media as an object of study while neglecting or downplaying its use as

a research tool. This paper argues social media as a new component of

the anthropologist’s tool kit while discussing and tying it to

qualitative methodologies and specific methods.

New Tools: Using Social Media in a Research Capacity

Over the past fifteen years, the Information Age yielded to a new

era of technological innovation recently deemed the Connected Age.

Expanding beyond the use of information technology and simple internet

access, the Connected Age is characterized by constant access to

communication and by social networking of a technological format.

With the advent of smart phones allowing internet access from a

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portable, pocket-sized device, humans are able to access their entire

social circle at any point, perform their job remotely, and explore

the world’s wealth of knowledge and information by only pressing a few

buttons.

Whether we choose to acknowledge it or not Facebook, Twitter,

LinkedIn, MySpace, Pinterest, YouTube, Imgur, and the other forty

social media services influence the interaction and daily lives of the

people we, as a discipline, study. In my own work with the survivors

of the 2011 tornado in Joplin, Missouri, I learned that social media

played a vital role in communication for a city with no landline

phones, television news, and extremely limited cell phone access.

Survivors used smartphones to access Facebook and Twitter, though data

transfer was extremely slow, to notify family of their safety and

discuss their experience. In the following weeks, social media acted

as a central information hub to connect survivors, city organizers,

and aid agencies.

Without exploring the social media dimension of Joplin,

Missouri’s experience, observers may wonder how a city with limited

resources and communication maintained such high levels of

organization and efficiency in wake of a large scale disaster.

Further, researchers might miss vital aspects of communication and the

formation of a cohesive social narrative. How can we argue for fully

exploring a topic or knowing the means of cultural production if we

pretend this nearly ubiquitous realm of exchange does not exist? Only

in the last couple years are works discussing methodological issues

regarding online research in anthropology appearing (Monroy-Hernandez

et al. 2013; Ybarra et al. 2012; boyd in press;n.d.). Yet through

this new technology, incorporated into the design of ethnographic

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research, anthropologists may access a richer dataset which

incorporates a people’s lives in both the physical and cyber world.

While the common image of a social media user is someone from an

affluent nation, capable of enough wealth to support the purchase of

necessary hardware and software to access the internet, indigenous

groups and those in impoverished regions are also present on Facebook,

Twitter, and other websites. The United World of Indigenous Peoples

(UWIP), Indigenous Peoples of Africa Coordinating Committee (IPACC),

and the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples all use social media to

share information with supporters, members, and a world audience.

These new technologies are credited with enabling revolutions and

social movements worldwide. Social media contributed to the birth of

the Occupy Movement (Castells 2012) and Tunisian and Egyptian

Revolutions of 2011 (Lotan et al 2011) by allowing participants and

organizers to circumvent government and traditional media restrictions

on communication while also giving an international audience to the

2009 – 2010 Iranian election protests (Zhou et al 2010). Even the

idea that computers and social media are useful only for a younger

generation is no longer accurate. Appreciating the utility of social

media, 61% of Facebook members and 64% of Twitter users are 35 years

of age or older (Hampton et al 2011). Thanks to programs like

“Facebook for Seniors” classes at one Bronx Library (Reaney 2012),

autodidactic elders, and tutoring from family or friends, even those

in their 90s are joining the Connected Age.

So prevalent is social media usage that, as of April 2013, 67.7%

of worldwide internet users visit at least one social media service

which translates to 24.4% of the total world population (eBizMBA

2013). Africa and the Middle East lead world continents in percentage

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of social media use for individuals capable of accessing the internet

with 80.5% while Western Europe trails with 61.5% of internet users

connecting via social media. Regarding percentages of population,

regardless whether they have internet access or not, North America

leads with 51.6% of its total population while Africa and the Middle

East fall to last place with 15.5% of their population using social

media. In number of users, however, Asia’s over 775 million users

exceed the nearest regional competitor by over half a billion and

account for nearly 45% of worldwide social media users (eMarketer

2013). Currently, Facebook tops the social media market with an

estimated 800 million unique users, followed by Twitter’s 250 million,

and LinkedIn’s 110 million (eBizMBA 2013).

With the adoption of social media use around the world, including

diverse cultural groups, and spanning multiple generations,

incorporating this technology could be an opportunity for

anthropological research. However, the surprisingly rapid growth and

relative newness of this phenomenon encourages anthropology to look at

social media as a subject of research, rather than a tool for the

exploration of topics not directly related to users online activity.

The importance of such connectivity and its impact on contemporary

societies are a vital area of research which should be encouraged, yet

it seems research into social media as a phenomenon only acknowledges

or uses social media as a research object. Topics of interest so far

have included online communities (Wilson & Peterson 2002; Bayn 2000),

social movements (Castells 2012; Lotan et al. 2011), the effects these

technologies have on personal relationships in non-internet life

(Ellison & boyd 2013; Miller 2011), and issues of privacy and safety

(boyd 2013; boyd & Hargittai in press;n.d.; boyd et al in press;n.d.).

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According to current usage statistics (eBizMBA 2013), one-fourth

of the world uses social media. The incorporation of this technology

into the daily lives of individuals around the world suggests the

separation between life in the “real world” and internet life is

shrinking, merging the two into one existence with multiple,

normalized forms of interaction. With this merging, social media

becomes another realm of cultural production through the dialogic

negotiation of individuals (Tedlock & Mannheim 1995), referring to the

ongoing modification and co-influence of actors through communicated

meaning. People may express more through their online activity than

they would in a random social situation or a formal interview,

particularly as the pool of contributors to online discourse is much

larger than the number of interlocutors present in physical-world

interactions.

In addition to exploring cultural production and negotiation,

social media allows researchers to maintain a presence in the field.

The nature of academia requires graduate students and faculty to

return to the university setting to attend or teach classes. While

extended stays on location periodically occur (depending on successful

funding), the time spent away from the daily lives of the studied

community can impact research. Returning to a site after a long

duration, whether months or years, requires time to learn all that

transpired while away and rekindle friendships to a point of easy

interaction in order to reinsert the anthropologist back into daily

life. While even social media cannot eliminate this period, remaining

in regular contact while away will lessen the adjustment period and

allow greater time for gathering data. The continued contact also

assists in planning before reaching the field. Through online

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discussions, researchers can plan visits with their contacts, gain

valuable introductions through mutual friends, and ask preliminary

questions to better prepare for fieldwork.

Finally, by maintaining a digital presence in the lives of the

community, anthropologists are aware of sudden events that may

necessitate immediate travel to conduct research or, if nothing else,

gather information as an event unfolds. In my research on disaster

affected communities, particularly tornado-impacted locations, the

ephemeral nature of the event makes it impossible to be physically

present during the first warning. However, contacts throughout the

area known as Tornado Alley frequently post online updates about

weather in April and May, the peak time for severe weather. Though

not part of an official research project at the time, I spent one

unnerving night talking online with a woman as a tornado touched down

in Wichita, Kansas and moved toward her neighborhood. Throughout that

day and night, I was simultaneously present with dozens of contacts,

some in the same city and others separated by one or two states, as

each experienced the line of storms and the howl of sirens. I felt

relieved when the storm passed, leaving her and all the others

unharmed, but the experience of reading updates and using Facebook

chat to be with them revealed how valuable this technology is to

studying such fleeting moments.

While Facebook is not the only social media service capable of

providing anthropological data, the most popular social media sites at

present are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Imgur, and Pinterest. Each

varies widely from the other in terms of use. Pinterest focuses on

creative projects, Imgur allows photo sharing, YouTube lets users

share videos, and Twitter customers post short status updates,

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thoughts, or opinions as well as links to other websites. Facebook,

however, stands apart from the others by its multiple usage features -

which I will describe shortly -, but also its ability to incorporate

the features of the other social media sites. For example, Facebook

users regularly share videos, images, and Pinterest items by embedding

them in their status updates. This allows Facebook to offer users the

most versatile and comprehensive social media experience, a feature

that further assists researchers to see more of their subjects’ lives,

interests, and production of shared meaning though cultural symbolism.

As Facebook offers the most comprehensive list of features and is

the most popular among the forty plus different social media

platforms, I will focus on describing its features and their research

benefits to emphasis the value of social media in anthropological

research. I am aware that these may change with format updates and

that other social media sites may eclipse Facebook’s popularity in the

years to come, but the basic use of social media as a research tool

should remain fairly similar. Facebook provides dialogic interaction

among members, archives posts on members’ individual pages, allows

multi-media embedding within posts, and provides users with a newsfeed

displaying the most recent posts from their social network partners.

While these are not the only features of Facebook, they are the most

salient for ethnographic research, providing a view of participants

interaction and self-expression over time. Other social media sites

share at least one feature in common, but no others combine these four

in a single location.

The archival quality of social media, particularly of Facebook

and Twitter (though YouTube and others allow time-stamped comments),

permits readers to observe a timeline of events, thoughts and

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conversations. Among the four aspects, this feature is the most

versatile for project inclusion, open to many types of analysis.

Using grounded theory methodology, an approach which uses data to

construct a theory rather than imposing a preconceived theory onto

data or searching for data in which to test a theory, studying and

coding the archives of several members of the community or group in

question highlights the emergence of common themes (Dey 1999; Glaser

1992; Glaser & Strauss 1967). These themes can assist in project

proposals and interview construction. Plus, the time stamp details

offer a second analytical aspect to determine if particular themes

emerge during set time intervals and indicate which outside forces may

influence the community.

In my experience working with the survivors of the May 22, 2011

tornado in Joplin, Missouri, I have found that comments related to a

person’s tornado experience usually surface in spring, during the

worst of severe weather season, peaking around the anniversary date of

the tornado. By the number of people who make these posts, I can

determine how widespread these thoughts are in a community. The

likelihood is high that these posts influence other authors to post

their own weather anxieties, but whether this is only an encouragement

to admit concerns in an informal, yet large, type of group therapy or

if these posts can trigger the anxieties of others has yet to be

determined. Even when authors may have no friends in common,

according to their profile, their social circles may overlap through

interactions in the physical world. Investigating these observations

and developing a theory on weather related anxiety, post-traumatic

stress, and the social dimensions of fear admission or provocation are

all examples of how Facebook archives can inspire research themes.

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Using social media archives, researchers are also able to perform

a longitudinal analysis of change. After setting the time frame of

posts in question, data coding may reveal significant changes in

thematically related material. This process may reveal degrees of

change (whether rapid or gradual), and what external events could

trigger a sudden transition by focusing attention on a particular

topic. Presidential election years often highlight social issues and

open a series of heated debates in response to news posts. Not only

are personal views observable, but watching the changes in response as

the political process moves forward can indicate shifting views and

polarization in the competing political camps.

When the data set for such a significant event is framed by a

significant event in the lives of the community, the archival aspect

of social media also permits a study of narrative reconstruction. In

the first few hours after the Joplin tornado, some survivors posted

detailed accounts of their experience. Other people shared their

story after a few days. Both responses exhibited raw emotion and

narrated a series of isolated scenes from the event and the evening of

emergency response. However, in the short time between the two types,

survivors had already imposed a more coherent narrative structure

linking some of the scenes together. Interviewing these same

individuals during the first anniversary, their accounts developed a

full narrative flow with one moment linking to the next. They also

highlighted specific moments that were thematically consistent with

the interviews of others but were not always thematically consistent

with their initial narration on social media. This indicates they not

only modified their story to maintain a constant linkage, but social

forces imposed a degree of importance to key moments (Halbwachs 1992).

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These patterns likely developed from mimicking the narrative patterns

of other survivors while influencing the patterns of others with their

own using a dialogic negotiation (Tedlock & Mannheim 1995) to

determine what events held greater significance to both the speaker

and their audience.

Unlike a private journal chronicling the life of an individual,

Facebook posts allow other users to add comments to the status updates

or shared media of others, so long as both accounts are connected by

the users’ agreement to do so or the initial message originated on a

public page open to all users. The majority of posts elicit only a

few responses with a large proportion of those relating directly to

the original message. However, public pages (open to any viewer) and

individuals with a disproportionately large number of Facebook

connections may generate hundreds of responses. In these

circumstances, a number of the respondents may respond to the comments

of others, rather than just the initial post, and begin a dialog with

any number of those included in the discussion.

The responses to original status posts, news reports, and other

embedded media reveal the dialogic feature of Facebook. According to

Dennis Tedlock and Bruce Mannheim, in the introductory chapter to The

Dialogic Emergence of Culture, “cultures are continuously produced,

reproduced, and revised in dialogues among their members” (1995:2).

Rather than culture being a uniformly imposing force directing

individuals, the emergent aspects of culture (constantly changing and

developing from social interaction) makes social media like Facebook

an ideal place to investigate these negotiations and exchanges. This

is particularly true for status updates which encourage multiple

responses from fellow users.

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The posts most likely to generate large volumes of responses are

embedded media posts, usually news articles or videos about a current

topic. These media items are also more likely to be shared, a Facebook

operation which allows users to re-post videos, images, status

updates, and external links from one user’s page to their own. Other

than news, users also post music and YouTube video to their Facebook

pages. The number of comments on a post combined with the number of

times the original post is re-posted offers insight into the relative

importance of one post over another in the eyes of viewers.

Finally, through Facebook’s newsfeed option, which allows users

to scan through a chronological composite of posts from all their

contacts, researchers can spot sudden trends and experience a multi-

locality presence during significant events. This feature is located

on the homepage, the first page viewed after users log in to their

account. The value of the newsfeed for research lives in the ability

to view the activity of multiple contacts at once. What may seem to

be an isolated post about a particular topic, event, or activity may

gain greater significance if a large portion of research contacts post

similar messages, for example after the May 20, 2013 tornado in Moore,

Oklahoma, many of my contacts from Joplin initially discussed a sense

of helplessness after learning of another large, fatal tornado. Each

mentioned they were uncomfortable admitting the feeling, perceiving

themselves as different or possibly not as resilient as their peers.

Watching the newsfeed, however, I could attest that this feeling was

common in Joplin. Shortly after, however, these same individuals

began organizing supplies and volunteers, eventually connecting their

efforts into a large-scale relief effort.

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However, because the data collected from status updates (like

those mentioned above) reveal personal feelings meant for a circle of

trusted family and friends, using collecting and using this

information requires a sensitive approach. While all universities

offer research guidelines and require an ethical review prior to

working with human subjects, few institutions provide specific

regulations for social media research. I believe that because these

websites provide information which is simultaneously private and

public, research using them should require excessive ethical review

before proceeding. Even when strict privacy guidelines are followed

to protect participants, researchers may be vulnerable when allowing

participants social media access to their own lives.

Researchers should ask several questions before including social

media in a project design. To begin with, will giving the

participants access to the researcher’s personal life jeopardize the

research? While many fields would feel this access conflicts with the

aims of research or breeches objectivity ethics, the social nature of

anthropology and our need to form trusting relationships with

participants creates a gray area for the separation of private life

and work. Many anthropologists create lifelong friendships with those

they have studied, often gaining adopted membership status and

becoming family to their hosts. Some may choose to create a separate

social media account specific to the project, but while this may

provide privacy benefits to the investigator and reduce the need to

sift through personal and professional information on a news feed,

some participants could find this tactic insulting. Why should they

share their personal lives with someone unwilling to do the same?

Even when the choice to separate private lives and fieldwork would not

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create insult, each investigator must determine whether they

personally, as a matter of their own well-being, require this

separation.

Guidelines for protecting participants, however, appear more

easily constructed from the numerous guidelines by Institutional

Review Boards (IRBs) and publications on research ethics. Extending

them to the realm of social media requires some modification, but

these extra efforts are vital to protecting the privacy of

participants, especially in a world where online lives often directly

impact lives in the physical world. Even when institutional guidelines

are followed, studies can misuse social media data in ways that still

leave participants feeling violated.

An example of this arose in 2008, when a research team published

a controversial data set gathered from the Facebook accounts of 1,700

students from a single university. Titled “Tastes, Ties, and Time,”

or T3, the study performed by Lewis et al (2008) tracked the data of

an entire first-year cohort over their four year college career. The

data focused on the creation of social networks among them and the

influence of tastes, activities, and housing. Additionally, the team

utilized enrollment data, such as name, address, and major, to

supplement the Facebook data (Lewis et al 2008).

While the Lewis et al team was lauded for the uniqueness of their

information, their ease at extrapolating such a wealth of data, and

their elimination of the self-reporting bias, the team soon drew

criticism for two reasons. First, though efforts to anonymize the

data set met the requirements of the university’s Internal Review

Board, the source of the data was discovered shortly after publication

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by using only the “anonymized” data available (Zimmerman 2010).

Second, beyond the problem of confidentiality, no students authorized

the use of their Facebook information. While the IRB which sanctioned

this study technically did not failed to uphold protocols, rather the

nature of social media data resisted anonymization via traditional

techniques. The information published could be compared with a raw-

data, online source to find the names of students involved rather than

prior research in which raw data is locked away to protect

confidentiality. Though the researchers failed to protect the

identity of the participants or secure their consent on grounds that

this was publicly published information, the study was not technically

illegal because the students had agreed to the privacy and information

use policies of the particular website. To clarify, each social media

outlet provides users with an extensive privacy policy for their

review as part of their account initiation and maintains an online

location to read the current policy at any time. While many users

will simply acknowledge agreement without reading the policy, their

expectation of protection remains. Unfortunately, their expectations

may not match the agreement they signed.

Many social media sites openly acknowledge the capture of user

activity for marketing purposes, research, and archiving. Facebook’s

data use policy explains to users how their information will be

captured, stored, and used for the company’s operational use,

advertisement marketing, and other third parties. While they promise

privacy, their carefully worded policy protects them in any situations

where users may not approve of the information shared. By stating

they do not share information unless they have “received your

permission; given you notice, such as by telling you about it in this

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policy, or removed your name and any other personally identifying

information from it,” they ensure notice is immediately given at sign-

up and thus they are free to use the data. As noted when discussing

the T3 study, even the removal of names and that which is deemed to be

other personally identifying information does not necessarily

anonymize the data (Zimmerman 2010). While this is the right of

companies like Facebook, as anthropologists, we must endeavor to

connect with subjects and gain their direct permission rather than use

the legally allowable third party loophole offered by privacy policy

agreements.

More problematic than Facebook’s policy is that of Twitter.

Though clearly announced in their privacy policy, the archiving of

user posts with the Library of Congress ensures there is a permanent

record of activity available to access at any time. This is part of

the library’s ongoing effort to record the story of the nation,

including the written statements from millions of citizens (Library of

Congress Blog 2010). At present, there are more petitions for

research access to this data than the library’s physical capability to

grant.

The ethical and legal grounds for the recording of Twitter

activity versus Facebook activity, however, differ in the nature of

privacy related to each site’s activity. Facebook users choose the

audience for their information, known as “friends”, setting privacy

options to restrict broadcast and are able to change those settings

for each new posting. Twitter, however, is a very public broadcast of

information where users endeavor to create an ever larger group of

followers in an attempt to reach the largest audience possible.

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Other social media sites also provide users with a privacy

policy, each differing from the others based on type of content and

company discretion. Imgur states they share information with third-

parties for the purpose of selecting appropriate advertising and do

not discuss research, notification of use, or archiving of content.

YouTube’s privacy policy, however, does not discuss ownership of

content or third-parties. Instead, their privacy policy centers

around the privacy of those appearing in videos and how to file

privacy complaints if an individual objects to something where they

are uniquely identifiable based on criteria of full name, address,

social security number, or contact information.

Navigating the law and ethics of online social media research

requires an understanding of privacy, the situated variables which

moderate the concept in context, and the cultural background of those

studied. The internet generally, and social media specifically,

create an ambivalent expression of the public/private dichotomy. On

one hand, the user content is published and placed in the public eye

for the purpose of viewing and acknowledgement by an audience. Users

expect someone to pay attention, otherwise the words or images would

be kept to private conversations or simply locked away from others.

On the other hand, people may feel this is their own intellectual

property and though public, is not free for use in any manner other

than how it was originally intended (Nissenbaum 2009).

The idea of privacy, for many individuals, involves more than

control of what is seen or unseen. In the words of boyd, “It’s about

a collective understanding of a social situation’s boundaries and

knowing how to operate within them. […] It’s about understanding the

audience and knowing how far information will flow.” (boyd 2010)

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While not an official protocol, the Association of Internet

Researchers published a guide for ethical research practices to assist

investigators in designing projects able to protect participants,

which is available online at http://aoir.org/reports/ethics.pdf.

My own recommendation for anthropologists employing Facebook as a

research tool is to connect to, and gain consent of, every participant

in the project. While cumbersome, this task ensures that any data

used in a project is used in a manner that respects the authors.

However, in cases where one cannot reach the social media user in

question, such as posts on a public or group forum, researchers do not

necessarily have to discard the data. Even when not directly

employable in a study, the information can yield exploratory

information to construct a grounded theory framework. Additionally,

if used to discuss a general sentiment expressed by many, the

composite of all similar posts may be represented without discussing

the user or quoting their content. Still, given the intimate nature

of ethnographic research, gaining the personal connections necessary

for informed consent further strengthens the data by allowing

investigators to ask questions of the online content’s author and

gather contextual information.

While nothing replaces physical fieldwork and the personal

connections formed through face-to-face ethnographic research,

investigation through social media can supplement this and other

methods. By providing a new dimension of data acquisition,

comparisons with fieldwork data and the introduction of time sensitive

archives, social media research makes new types of research questions

possible whole also providing a more thorough means to answer

traditional anthropological inquiries. While already available on the

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internet, the personal nature of social media posts require, at

minimum, the same level of informed consent and ethical treatment as

interviews. After all, discussing any subject’s Facebook activity can

reveal their identity if not protected. Through careful planning in

project design, detailing the methods of data collection and

protection, the inclusion of social media in ethnographic research

provides a fuller view of a people’s life with a richer dataset to

determine what it means to be human.

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Sunday M. Moulton is a Ph.D. student in anthropology and a

Presidential Fellow at The State University of New York at Buffalo,

her dissertation research explores identity, social memory, landscape,

and community resilience in natural disasters. Prior to attend SUNY

Buffalo, Sunday graduated Summa Cum Laude from Youngstown State

University in Ohio, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and a

second Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies.

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