HELPING PEOPLE'S

Hayley Lepps is a Researcher at NatCen Social Research Earlier in the year I was invited to attend a two-day workshop hosted by the University of Aberdeen, as part of their ESRC‐funded project “Social Media, Privacy and Risk: Towards More Ethical Research Methodologies”.  The workshop was attended by some of the leading thinkers & practitioners in social media research, and based on our experiences and research (including my own work on NatCen's “ Research using Social Media: Users’ Views ” project), we aimed  to develop a set of flexible guidelines for the ethical use of social media data in research, intended to be used by researchers, students, ethics committees, funding bodies, and anyone else with an interest in the ethics of working with social media data. Following the workshop, the outputs were then pulled together by the team at Aberdeen, and  the draft guidelines were discussed at the AcSS/ NSMNSS conference on ethics and social media research.  I was ...

Curtis Jessop  is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network On Wednesday 29 th June I attended a roundtable hosted by our network partners SAGE on using big data to solve social science problems. It was a great day, with contributions from leading researchers and lots of discussion of some of the key issues of working with big data in social science. Jane Elliott began with an overview of the ESRC’s Big Data Network. She identified the difficulties with data access that earlier phases had faced, but also highlighted key challenges that big data social science currently faces: 1. Methodological Can we apply the same qualitative techniques/statistical inferences we have in the past? Are social scientists (falling) behind in using machine learning & algorithms? What are the implications of these methods? 2. Relevance of research Making sure we use big data to answer pertinent social science questions, and not just focus on meth...

Joe Murphy is a senior survey methodologist with over 17 years of research and project management experience. Mr. Murphy has extensive experience developing and applying new technologies and modes of communication to improve the quality, relevance, and efficiency of survey research. His recent work has centered on the use and analysis of social media to supplement survey data, with a detailed focus on Twitter. Mr. Murphy also investigates optimal designs for multi-mode data collection platforms, data visualization, crowdsourcing, and social research in virtual worlds. Mr. Murphy is a demographer by training and survey methodologist by practice. His significant research experience includes the substantive topics of energy, hospitals and health care, and substance use and mental health. Mr. Murphy is also a proficient SAS programmer, experienced in the analysis and manipulation of large, complex data sets. @joejohnmurphy   Over the last couple years, I’ve been looking at Tw...