HELPING PEOPLE'S

Curtis Jessop is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network I’m playing catch-up a little bit here, but thought I’d share some thoughts on a presentation from Professor Woodrow Hartzog (slides here ) at an ethics symposium I attended on 19 th July hosted by the Web Science Institute . The presentation focussed on the ethics of how our data are collected online, arguing that insufficient attention is paid to the design of information technology. Giving a number of examples of how IT had failed ethically at a design stage, Professor Hartzog challenged the idea that ‘there are no bad technologies, only bad users’, asserting that there is no such thing as neutral design. Following this thought, he suggested that the principle of giving users control (e.g. over privacy settings) does not reflect how people actually use technology and can be overwhelming (managing all settings for all accounts), or even manipulated to disguise/protect t...

We are pleased to announce that our next event, 'An introduction to tools for social media research' is now open for bookings! It will be a full-day event run on Tuesday 11th October 2016, and we have lined up eight great speakers to introduce a mix of (mostly) free-to-use tools, demonstrating with real examples how they can be used in the analysis of a range of social media platforms. You can find out more information about the day and the speakers on our event page here . Tickets are £95 for SRA members, and £115 for non-members. If you'd like to attend, please visit the SRA event page to register. Look out for more information on the timetable for the day and abstracts for the individual sessions shortly! The #NSMNSS team

Masumi Izawa is an energy-efficiency consultant in Portland, Ore gon, USA with a background in social media market research and environmental psychology. She is the lead author of a myth-busting journal article on the Hawthorne Illumination Experiments–the experi- ments synonymous with the “Hawthorne effect.” On the side, she blogs about   online   dating. Friendster was all the rage back when I was being schooled on social science research methods in college. By the time I reached grad school and was studying social science research methods again, social media had become commonplace. It was also during this time that I began using social media and digital communication tools to complete grad school research projects, primarily out of efficiency and convenience reasons. This included using Facebook to recruit participants, Skype to conduct a focus group, an onlin...

Curtis Jessop is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research where he works on longitudinal surveys and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network Next year, I, along with Luke Sloan and Tarek Al Baghal , will be running an experiment on the Understanding Society Innovation Panel to look at the feasibilities and practicalities of linking Twitter and survey data in a longitudinal context, and how they can be combined to improve the quality of both. We will be specifically focussing on how survey data can be enhanced using social media data (for example by creating new measures, validating survey estimates or improving non-response adjustments) and how social media data can be validated using survey data. However, we are aware that such a dataset has a greater potential than this, so we are also thinking about the ethics and practicalities that may be involved in making this dataset available more widely. This will no doubt be tricky – as far as we are aware it is unprecedented to a...