HELPING PEOPLE'S

Jenna Condie is a Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Salford. She is also the network's avid Twitter Manager. Contact her on @jennacondie. Although an advocate of both digital communication and qualitative methods, I am yet to combine these two interests to carry out qualitative interviews online. The timing therefore seemed right for me to review ‘Qualitative Online Interviews’ by Dr Janet Salmons, as I do want (or need!) to learn more about this growing approach within social science research. ‘Qualitative Online Interviews’ guides the novice researcher through the entire research process from start to finish. Not to be “shelved after a single reading” (Salmons, 2015, p. xviii), this book is designed as a ‘go to’ resource to consult as and when a particular research issue arises. The updates in the second edition reflect the increasingly mediated nature of our social lives since the first edition was published in 2010. An e-interview rese...

Kelsey Beninger is a researcher at NatCen Social Research and can be contacted through Twitter @KBeninger. Attending two conferences related to social media the past three days took me on a long journey, and not just from the 6 train rides, nonexistent mobile reception or from navigating my way around overly complex campus layouts! My journey also included the reflection on different approaches to talking about social media research and the need, now more than ever, to be transparent about what we do, why we do it and what is wrong with our approaches (because we aren’t perfect- it’s too early days!). At the European Conference on Social Media in Brighton I was fortunate to meet and learn from some of the people from the 35 different countries represented. While I wont shy away from saying that I think the strongly academic focus was a wee bit theoretical for my applied social policy mind, I did learn about very different types of projects, from e-health platforms in Lithuania and ...

The World Cup is almost over and the summer holidays are imminent so we thought it would be helpful to update you all on progress with the Book of Blogs. We now have eleven blogs uploaded to the book, 40 people who’ve committed to writing a blog and lots of wider interest. So to those of you who’ve already written and posted your blogs to the Press Books site thank you. For the rest of you we thought it would be helpful to remind you that the instructions for uploading to the Press Books site can be found   here  and general guidance on the book  here . We do need you to sign up formally so if you haven’t already please go to this Google Docs spreadsheet and sign up:  https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-56cjkafF9efK43P-udLvH5BdFZf_7z9RyACR2Tc-a4/edit?usp=sharing . We’ll remove your email address immediately. Our goal is to have 60% of the content uploaded by the end of this month so please do let us know if you’ve written your blog and are ready to upload it now...

This week has seen a lot of coverage, and controversy, around the 'Facebook Experiment', where users' news feeds were filtered and the impact on their own posting habits analysed. For a bit of context, you can find the original paper here , an initial article on the research from the Guardian here , a legal perspective here , and a response from the lead author of the paper here .  We thought this would be a great issue to frame another Tweetchat around as it raises a number of interesting questions for social researchers: Is this any different from the regular 'A/B testing' that websites routinely carry out, and how? Is accepting 'Terms and conditions' a sufficient indication of consent? If not, what should Facebook (or other researchers) have done? What elements of this research do you think the public are more concerned about? What was the role of academics involved in the study? Despite not collecting the data themselves, did they have an obligation to c...