HELPING PEOPLE'S

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...

María Belén Conti is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. As a journalist, I usually find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to social media: would it affect my job opportunities if I openly express my opinion of certain topics online as my friends do? Should I always be professional because if anything personal is filtered I will lose my credibility (major asset for a journalist)? Some may say that the best solution is to have two different profiles, one for personal and other professional proposes ( EFE, 2011 ; Restrepo, 2012 ). But again, the personal profile is there and the chance of information, opinions or photos filtering to audiences we don’t want to reach is still high. “You have one identity...The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”, said Mark Z...