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...

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...