HELPING PEOPLE'S

We invite posters presenting your experiences of conducting social media research in any of the social sciences. Your topic could relate to the challenges you have faced, the benefits you’ve found from utilising social media platforms for social research, issues relating to ethics, quality or participant engagement. Poster submissions provide an opportunity to present your research to a wider audience of our network members. We will be running two virtual poster sessions during our digital event on 23rd April. Virtual posters will take the traditional poster presentation beyond the limitations of a coffee break or brief poster session to a bigger audience and wider debate online during our Digital Debates sessions. The goal of a virtual poster is the same as for a traditional poster: to present your research in an informative, attractive, and succinct format. Posters will be hosted on the NSMNSS blog, with brief summaries of the research and the opportunity to share comments on the pos...

After the success of our webinar on qualitative methods ( http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/update-from-our-webinar.html ) we’ll be hosting a webinar on quantitative research and new social media on Monday the 8th of April. The webinar will follow the format of the previous webinar, a panel if researchers will outline three key issues for quantitative research and then open the discussion up to the floor. In advance of the webinar we’d like to invite network members to let us know if there are any burning issues that they would like to see addressed during the webinar. We’d also like to invite network members who’d like to present case studies or sessions during the webinar to get in touch with us. If there any particular issues you’d like to see us address, either leave us a comment below, tweet us or email jerome.finnegan@natcen.ac.uk . If you’re searching for inspiration, why not take a look at some of the videos from our quant knowledge exchange seminar http://nsmnss.blogspot.co...

Mike O’Driscoll is a freelance researcher specialising in fields of attitudes to IT, experiences of e-learning, and evaluation in health and education. You can contact him at odriscollfm@gmail.com   I am sure that social media will have as profound an impact on social research as computers and the internet have already had. As desktop PCs with broadband have become the norm for most households (although a significant minority remain excluded) every aspect of social research has been transformed. Taking surveys as an example  - the internet has profoundly changed typical methods of sampling and recruitment (e.g. a greater use of panel or convenience samples), the delivery of the data collection instrument (e.g. a link in an email), the survey mode (online or email survey), survey analysis  (being able to see and interact with results in real time through online survey software interfaces) and dissemination (reports can be made instantly available to research commissio...

9.30am Registration, tea and coffee 10-10.30am Keynote: NSMNSS one year on – what have we learnt? NSMNSS team 10.30am- 11.15am Research findings: Getting the ethics of social media research – learning from NSMNSS project Janet Salmons 11.15am Tea and coffee – poster exhibition, digital listening posts and stalls 11.30am Research findings: What role is there for social media research in government social policy NESTA 12.15pm-1.30pm        Lunch, poster exhibition, digital listening posts and stalls 1.30pm Keynote: The politics of Big Data TBC 2.15pm-3.45pm Workshop sessions Workshop Stream 1 :   Collecting Quantitative Social Media Data How do I collect data from Twitter? Sampling social media data/ Exploring and refining data Collecting & analysing social network data from social media Social media polling of hard to reach groups / Using social media data alongside survey data Workshop Stream 2:   Analysing & Visualizing Social Media D...

We are delighted to announce our end of year conference event on April 16th 2013 at the Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street , London EC1Y 8LX from 9.30am - 4.30pm. We hope this will be a lively, forward looking event to celebrate the 1st birthday of our network. See teh draft programme here . The conference is free of charge, but places are limited to 40.  If you haven't received an email invite please contact claire.ashby@natcen.ac.uk to request a place. The closing date for application for places is noon on April 3rd 2013. We are looking for network members to contribute posters from their own social media research projects for the poster session and will be publishing the call for posters on the NSMNSS blog later this week. We will be asking poster contributors to also participate in our first digital debate on 23rd April (see below). For those of you who can’t attend in person we are running several online activities and events over coming weeks which we ho...

There’s lots of debate amongst academics and researchers about what’s ethical in social media research but what do the public think about researchers scrutinising their tweets? This year, six of our grads are tackling this important issue in a new and novel way – by asking them! They’ll be using online and offline qualitative methods to collect the views of social media users. Every year our cohort of grads design, conduct and write-up a new and bespoke research study enabling them to demonstrate all their research skills and gain valuable on the job experience. To support one of this year’s teams, we wanted to call on the collective wisdom and experience of the NSMNSS network members. We’d like to invite members to make a small commitment to act as an expert reference group to ensure that our grads’ project has external viability and is asking the right questions. This would be a great opportunity for network members to feed into a project asking questions that aren’t being asked else...

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Twitter during the final NSMNSS event to discuss issues related to data and analysis quality arising from social media research - it was great to have a range of people involved. If you weren't able to make the event, or if you want to take another look at what was said, the transcript is available after the jump... From User Tweet VickiMcDermott RT @StephenWNatCen: Excellent #NSMNSS quality in social media event today with @G_Morrell @jess1ecat @VickiMcDermott @DrLukeSloan @KBeninger @NatCen jess1ecat Are you conducting e-research? @NSMNSS needs your input to identify what ethical guidelines should look like http://t.co/tqUa3DVWlv #NSMNSS barbour_rose Attended really interesting session today on social media research #NSMNSS jess1ecat Yes “@bristoljames: Can #Twitter open up a new space for learning, teaching and thinking? http://t.co/BDaCkMmeXt via @guardian” #NSMNSS DrLukeSloan RT @StephenWNatCen: Excellent #NSMNSS quality in social media ...