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...

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...

Milena Popova is a PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol. She is researching approaches to sexual consent in fanfiction and online fan communities. She tweets as @elmyra and blogs about her research at pornresearcher.eu . My PhD research focuses on depictions of sexual consent in online fanfiction: amateur-produced fiction based on existing media, such as TV shows, movies or books. I am using a range of methods to study the fanfiction community and its cultural output. Here some thoughts on the ethical questions I have come up against while designing and conducting my research. A brief introduction to the fanfiction community: Modern fanfiction originated in paper zines, but these days the vast majority of the community (or communities, really) live and communicate online, in spaces that are on the cusp of the private-public boundary. Fanfiction, and the communities that produce it, are a Google search away - if you know about them. The fanfiction commun...

Last Monday (11 th May) the SRA, along with NSMNSS, hosted a seminar looking at ethics and informed consent in the context of online research. As long-standing network members will know, the ethical challenges of conducting research has been something that has consistently cropped up as a core concern for social scientists looking to use social media in their research, and this event demonstrated that this continued to be the case. Matt Williams from the Social Data Science Lab kicked off proceedings with a discussion of his experiences of ethics in social media research based on his work with COSMOS , a platform for accessing Twitter data. Matt focussed on some of the issues relating to publishing research based on Twitter data, and how Twitter’s policies relating to the publication of Tweets (showing names, @usernames, and unmodified Tweet text) can clash with researchers requirements of anonymity and protecting participants from harm, before outlining their approach to ‘risk ass...

Last year we had a number of successful twitter chats on topics from generating representative online datasets to the changing roles of social media researchers in an increasingly mediated world. Based on topics arising from our previous discussions, and current issues and emerging trends in online research, we have a number of topics for upcoming #NSMNSS twitter chats this year (see below). However, we really want our chats to be led by you - which topic we should discuss first?   Have a read and cast your votes here !   We will announce the winning topic on Twitter.   The first chat is on Tuesday 3 rd February at 5pm (UK time. You can time check for your location here ). To blog or not to blog? What a question! Why are we blogging (or not)? What are the opportunities and challenges of blogging for our research? What are the relationships between blogging and traditional forms of publishing? How can we use quantitative metrics to know more about our audiences and what ...

Kandy Woodfield is one of our NSMNSS network leaders, she's based at NatCen Social Research and you can contact her on Twitter @jess1ecat I was delighted to be able to present the work of the #NSMNSS network to a roundtable event today hosted by the ESRC and the Indian Council of Social Science Research . The event, supported by the Newton Fund , aimed to bring together academics working in social media research in both the UK and India to explore shared interests and opportunities for collaboration. It was a lively discussion and provided an opportunity for me to reflect on how far the network has come in the three years we have been building our community. Here's the presentation:

It's been a whirlwind summer, full of sport, sunshine, a bit of rain (at least here in the UK) and I hope you've had some memorable holidays... In amongst all that something pretty special has been happening at the #bookofblogs HQ. Over the last nine weeks researchers, practitioners, academics and bloggers have been penning their thoughts on the use of social media for research and sharing them with us. Back in June when I wrote sometimes you have to 'just do it'  and lobbed the idea of a crowd-sourced book of blogs into the Twittersphere, it wasn't without a fair bit of trepidation. Would anyone respond? What would people write about? Would we reach beyond existing bloggers and network members. You know what, people (yes that's you!) really did respond . We've now got 40 uploaded blogs, just ten short of our target and whilst we've lost a few authors along the way (we'll miss you), we've gained others. And in keeping with our goal 'you write...

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 ...

Wow, we've been blown away by the response to our call for contributors , please see our previous post for the background to this crowdsourced project. If you've already read that and are keen to get going then here are your next steps: Step 1 - email us at: nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk we will then send you a link to access the contributors spreadsheet. Step 2 - complete the Google Doc spreadsheet with your basic information and any ideas or suggestions you have for the book, we can then send you a log in for the platform we'll be using to publish the book. Step 3 - get writing! Step 3a . - ( optional ) send it to us if you would like the editorial support group to provide some constructive feedback. Step 4 -  upload it - you're done!  Are we uploading content ourselves then? Ideally yes, it would be really helpful if, once you have written your blog, you could upload it yourself. We are a small team & the network is currently unfunded so we have chosen a process w...

We've been thinking a lot at #NSMNSS about what types of activities the network should support next. One idea we've been ruminating on for a while is creating a volume of crowdsourced blogs on the impact social media are having on social science research methods . (We are also supporting the development of a new Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods which many network members will be contributing to but this is on a longer time-span and will be published in a more traditional way.) We got the idea for this from David De Souza (@dds180) and his hugely successful HR book of blogs Humane, Resourced which topped the best seller nonfiction business charts last year. We want to try and replicate this success and believe it will be a great showcase for network members to share their experiences and views about social media research with a wider audience. The broad idea is to reach 100+ pages of content collected from a  multitude of contributors from across the social scie...

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...

By  Janet Salmons, PhD  #einterview and www.vision2lead.com The New Social Media, New Social Science network is dedicated to an exploration of whether and how social science researchers should embrace social media. But what is “social media”? I considered this need for definition in an NSMNSS post. Subsequently we convened a Tweetchat and also offered the opportunity for input through a questionnaire. After reviewing the dialogue, comments and materials referenced, a more nuanced definition of social media is taking shape. Helen Mara pointed to the word “social” as key in describing the scope of synchronous or asynchronous conversation possible. "Social" may refer to posts that are public (can be read by anyone) or private (exchange between people in defined group). Antonella Esposito suggested that social media refers to a “complex ecology, not just specific tools.” Some of the comments provide an almost poetic view: Chareen Snelson suggested that “Social media might be tho...