HELPING PEOPLE'S

This post was first published on Survey Post on Feb. 3rd, 2014. Recently, I attended two statistical events in the Washington, DC, area: one was the 23rd   Morris Hansen Lecture   on “Envisioning the 2030 U.S. Census”; the other was the   SAMSI workshop   on “Computational Methods for Censuses and Surveys.” “Big data” was a popular keyword at both events and stirred up discussions on how to utilize it (such as from administrative records and online data sources) for current government statistics, especially when combining big data with  traditional survey data. Statisticians are exploring new ways in which big data can be used. The US Census has initiated investigations on  using administrative records in the 2020 Census . The National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) has identified some  research opportunities combining multiple data sources . University-based researchers  have launched studies on the use of Google trends and other online da...

The 4th  Social Media in Social Research  event is being held on the 16th May in London, it would be great if lots of network members submitted papers so please do get your thinking caps on.  The call for papers closes on 10th March. We'd like to start sharing news about network members who are presenting social media research papers at upcoming conferences, so please let us know if you're presenting at this or other conference by adding a comment here or tweeting @NSMNSS.

Over the last 40 years SAGE has become world famous for publishing the highest-quality and most cutting-edge books on research methods.  Yet research methods – the “how” of doing research – is still commonly considered a dry and abstract subject.  SAGE needs your help to change that!   Launching in May 2014, SAGE Research Methods Cases is an innovative and exciting  new  collection of hundreds of real-life research projects distilled into accessible , peer-reviewed case studies.  Our goal is to bring methodological concepts and problems to life   in a fully- comprehensive resource .   The collection with be published online on the award winning SAGE Research Methods platform. Get Involved! We plan to commission cases for SAGE Research Methods Cases on an ongoing basis ,  so  we are  still looking for  case authors .    Have you undertaken a research project? Can you discuss your methodological choices and challenges i...

We held a small event on Friday 21st February 2014, our goal was to have a series of focused discussions around the ethical dimensions of social media research and to come up with a series of action points for the network to take forward. The day also included two presentations of related research by network members. You can read a a storify of the day  -  sfy.co/rPSZ   W e will post more about the outcomes and discussions shortly but we want to kick off by sharing links to the two reports and presentations.  A team from NatCen has been researching the views of social media users on how their posted data should be handled by researchers. The findings are illuminating and will help to inform how we consider we should work with social media data in the future. You can read a post by the research team here , and then the findings here . Now Janet Salmons introduces the research she has undertaken on what researchers need to help support their ethical practice when condu...

Amy Aisha Brown is a research student in the Faculty of Education and Language Studies at the Open University and is PhD Blogger for the NSMNSS Network. She reflects here on the current state of ethics for her research project, outlined in this post. At a conference I attended recently, a plenary speaker give an inspiring talk about using YouTube videos to research various sociolinguistic phenomena. However, I was a little surprised by the fact that he failed to mention any ethical considerations that researchers might need to take in using them. I say I was surprised, but I wasn’t really surprised: It seems to be a common argument in many fields that says, “if someone was happy enough to post it, and if anyone with an internet connection can access it, then why shouldn’t it be collected and researched?” This argument is easy to apply to tweets (the data I use) because Twitter only lets you see and collect public tweets. Furthermore, users agree to their tweets being collected because...

Keurkoon Phoomwittaya is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. They travelled with me to many places in my hometown in Thailand and flew across the sky to England. I take them on every journey that I go. Since I was young, I used to write stories about travelling experiences in my secret notebook. I kept it in my backpack. Now I have a smart phone as another object which I use for capturing moments and telling my stories via social media platforms. Turkle says that "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with" (2007:5). The things that we take around us provoke emotions toward moments that we relate to. Not only do we use mobile phones to share life moments online, we also observe stories that our friends tell. We often imagine along with their stories, but we do not sense exactly the same as how they feel. Indeed, we know best our own embodied experience of being in a place, and why we choose to tell about it. The import...