HELPING PEOPLE'S

Patrick Readshaw is a Media and Cultural Studies Doctoral Candidate at Canterbury Christ Church University. Patrick is interested in social media as an alternative and empowering source of information on current events, free from the constraints of other agenda-setting media forms. You can contact Patrick by email on p.j.readshaw68@canterbury.ac.uk     When I was asked to write a blog for NSMNSS, I was certainly excited and being my first post of this kind I was suitably anxious about the prospect. However, my ongoing thesis has never ceased to provide interesting discussions with individuals in linked or parallel fields relating to social media. The main caveat in these discussions is that I often have to try not to over complicate things. With that in mind and my ham-fisted introduction out of the way I want to take some time to break down the value of so called “new media systems” like Twitter and the how I personally go about dealing with the data I collect.  Sinc...

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat. Yesterday the NSMNSS network published its first ebook, a collection of over fifty blogs penned by researchers from around the world who are using social media in their social research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first book of blogs in the social sciences.   It draws on the insights of experienced and well-known commentators on social media research through to the thoughts of researchers new to the field. Why did we choose to publish a book of blogs rather than a textbook or peer-reviewed article?   In my view there is space in the academic publishing world for peer reviewed works and self-published books. We chose to publish a book of blogs rather than a traditional academic tome because we wanted to create something quickly which reflected the concerns and voices of our members. Creating a di...

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat. It started with a tweet, a blog post and a nervous laugh. Three months later I found  myself looking at a book of blogs. How did that happen?! Being involved in the NSMNSS network since its beginning has been an ongoing delight for me. It's full of researchers who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, question established thinking and break down a few silos. When I began my social research career, mobile phones were suitcase-sized and collecting your data meant lugging a tape recorder and tapes around with you. That world is gone, the smartphone most of us carry in our pockets now replaces most of the researcher's kitbag, and one single device is our street atlas, translator, digital recorder, video camera and so much more. Our research world today is a different place from 20 years ago, social media are comm...

Sebastian Stevens is an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant at Plymouth University. He teaches research methods to social science students specialising in quantitative methods. He is on twitter @sebstevens99 and has a blog site at www.everydaysocialresearch.com.  A key benefit that social media can bring to social science research is through impact and engagement. Demonstrating how a research project will achieve impact and engage the public is a key requirement of most social science research bids today, with many funders looking for more than the traditional conference and journal article as being sufficient. Funders today want to see not only how your research will contribute to the current body of knowledge, but also how your research could impact other areas of academia as well as providing public engagement and economic and societal wide benefits. To promote your research to the widest possible audience, it is often necessary to use a number of Social Medi...

Kath McNiff is a Technical Communicator at QSR. You can contact Kath on @KMcNiff. This post was originally published on the NVivo blog. You can read more by Kath and other NVivo bloggers by visiting http://blog.qsrinternational.com/ Somewhere on your computer there are articles to review and interviews to analyze. You also have survey results, a few videos and some social media conversations to contend with. Where to begin? Well, here’s one approach: Push a few buttons and bring everything into NVivo. Then dive head-first into your material and code the emerging themes. Become strangely addicted to coding and get caught up in a drag and drop frenzy. Then come up for air – only to be faced with 2000 random nodes and a supervisor/client demanding to know what it all means. Or, you could do what successful NVivo users have been doing for the past six years – take a sip of your coffee and open Qualitative Data Analysis with NVivo. This well-thumbed classic (published by SAGE) has been ...

Dr. Nicos Rossides is the CEO of Medochemie, an international pharmaceutical company with more than 100 operations worldwide. Nicos is also the Chairman of DigitalMR's Advisory Board. This post originally appeared on the Digital MR blog www.digital-mr.com/blog/ Nobel laureate Kahneman has written a seminal book on the different types of thinking processes we humans deploy. In “Thinking, Fast and Slow” he argues that cognitive biases profoundly affect our daily decisions - from which toothpaste to buy, to where we should go on holiday. He goes on to claim that our decision processes can be understood only by knowing how two different thinking systems shape the way we judge and decide: "System 1" is fast, instinctive, subconscious and emotional;   "System 2" is slower, deliberative, logical.   The book delineates cognitive biases, such as how we frame choices, loss aversion, and our tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events . .  All th...

Mark Carrigan is a sociologist and academic technologist and first wrote this blog post for his blog http://markcarrigan.net/ . Contact Mark on Twitter @mark_carrigan Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson ( USApp , @ ChrisHJGilson ), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy ( Social Theory Applied , @christinacost & @ socialtrampos ), Donna Peach ( PhD Forum ,Donna_Peach) and Kelsey Beninger ( NSMNSS , @KBeninger) to discuss possible collaborations between social science bloggers in the UK and share experiences about developing and sustaining social science blogs over time. We didn’t do as much of the latter as I expected, though I personally found it valuable simply to voice a few concerns I’d had in mind about the direction of academic blogging that I’d heretofore been keeping to myself for a variety of reasons. The manner in which the audience for Sociological Imagination seems to have stopped growing over the las...

Kathleen McNiff is a blogger with QSR International, the people that brought you NVivo. Get in touch with Kath on Twitter @ KMcNiff . Imagine you’re sitting on a qualitative goldmine—in-depth interviews, focus groups, intriguing survey results, nuanced observations and a comprehensive lit review.  All the traditional boxes are ticked and yet there’s the nagging feeling that something is missing.  Chances are, it’s social media—and that’s probably why you’re here.   The Challenges There are so many impassioned and revealing conversations taking place online that it’s becoming harder (and more dangerous) to ignore them.  But embracing social media is not straightforward and you may be grappling with questions such as:   How do I build social media into my research design? What platforms are worth concentrating on? How should I collect the data? What tools and methods should I use to analyse it? NVivo gives you a practical way to face these challenges.   NCa...

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 ...

By Jinshuang Zhao, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Could you image your life without the Internet in contemporary society? What difficulties can you overcome with the help of Internet? How do information and communication technology influence society? If you are interested to learn more about these issues, please watch my video that presents interviews with Christian Fuchs and Eran Fisher.  Watch the video of the interview here!  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Gt_8SQiSc Christian Fuchs is professor of social media at the University of Westminster and is conducting research about the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) and society. He is a neo-Marxist and utilises Marxist theory for theorizing the connections between ICT and society. Eran Fisher is an assistant professor at the Open University of Israel, He is the author of “Media and New Capitalism in the Digital Age”. His research fields are media and c...

Janet Salmons is a network member and a contributing expert to the online team.  The cover of the Going Viral book attracted my attention at the Association of Internet Researchers’ conference—and stimulated my curiosity. “Going viral” is another of those terms we commonly use, but what does it really mean? By understanding the term, can we become better observers of viral events? I asked the authors, Karine Nahon @karineb and Jeff Hemsley @JeffHemsley if they would share some insights with the NSMNSS community. Our discussion went like this: JS: Can you discuss the research or thought process that went into your definition for “virality” as described on page 16? Virality is a social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own social network to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number...

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.   Making sense of the obvious tension between online visibility and privacy is never going to be a straightforward thing for me. Having worked as a reporter and a corporate communication specialist for more than two decades, I have some sense of dealing with public scrutiny of my work. Until now, social media was just for me another platform.  If you know newspapers, I used to think, you shouldn’t have problems functioning in the new environment that digital convergence has created. Or so I thought. Just weeks after arriving for the Social Media MA at Westminster University , I have come to agree with danah boyd that being visible through social media can both complicate and enrich our lives (boyd, 2012). Social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer new ways of engagement that have collapsed the walls of privacy, sometimes with terrible consequences. Henry Jenkins captures thi...