Social media research: Issues of performativity and validity
Keeva Rooney is a researcher at NatCen focusing on health surveys using bio-medical data. She has a BA (hons) in Sociology with a specialism in Social Policy from University of Warwick. During her studies, Keeva often used social media in her research, with one of her project’s focusing on online facebook groups for disabled people affected by the bedroom tax. Social media research attracts many researchers due to its offer of practicality, creativity and accuracy which comes from its often covert nature. The idea that you can produce valid research by analysing people’s online activity is attractive to researchers looking for more innovative and contemporary ways to achieve a true insight into society. However, is the assumption that people act online as they would offline a valid one? And if not, does this raise concerns over the reliability, representativeness and overall accuracy of using social media for research purposes? Feminist theorist Judith Butler studied how people ‘perfo...