Qualitative Research Using Social Media

Gwen Bouvier, Joel Rasmussen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000555288
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Investigación y metodología en psicología

Do you want to study influencers? Opinions and comments on a set of posts? Look at collections of photos or videos on Instagram? Qualitative Research Using Social Media guides the reader in what different kinds of qualitative research can be applied to social media data. It introduces students, as well as those who are new to the field, to developing and carrying out concrete research projects. The book takes the reader through the stages of choosing data, formulating a research question, and choosing and applying method(s).

Written in a clear and accessible manner with current social media examples throughout, the book provides a step-by-step overview of a range of qualitative methods. These are presented in clear ways to show how to analyze many different types of social media content, including language and visual content such as memes, gifs, photographs, and film clips. Methods examined include critical discourse analysis, content analysis, multimodal analysis, ethnography, and focus groups. Most importantly, the chapters and examples show how to ask the kinds of questions that are relevant for us at this present point in our societies, where social media is highly integrated into how we live. Social media is used for political communication, social activism, as well as commercial activities and mundane everyday things, and it can transform how all these are accomplished and even what they mean.

Drawing on examples from Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat, Reddit, Weibo, and others, this book will be suitable for undergraduate students studying social media research courses in media and communications, as well as other humanities such as linguistics and social science-based degrees.

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780429319334-1

Asking questions about social media

Social media are embedded in and shape all parts of life. At the turn of this century, Howard (2000) noted that people were becoming increasingly reliant on the Internet to accomplish basic daily tasks, to do shopping, find a playground for the children, learn how to play the piano, or check out a diagnosis for that rash on a child’s foot. This marked a huge shift in society in many ways. Perhaps the first significant change was that information became so much more easily accessible. Formerly, it may have taken a trip to a library, or even ordering a specialist book. Optimists at the time saw the potential for all human knowledge to be immediately available to anyone with a few clicks on their keyboard. There was much excitement that anyone with a computer and Internet connection could upload content. Formerly, knowledge had always come top down, from publishers, media companies, and other institutions. This sounded incredibly democratizing.

Since Howard wrote this, a huge part of being online can involve, or is integrated with, social media. This means that these same tasks of gaining information, acquiring knowledge, and developing skills may be accomplished on different social media platforms. We may rely on social media to engage with and understand major events happening in society and politics, to go about our daily working activities, or to communicate with our dentist. More specialist sites and feeds will address and cater for specific interests and communities. They allow us to build remote international communities. In fact, one of the earlier slogans of Facebook was the idea of connecting all of humanity. Some put it that social media are not so much simply embedded in our everyday lives, but rather our lives are embedded in social media (Thurlow et al., 2004: 75).

Researchers are still working out the consequences all this has. Many things are now done so differently than before and are in transition as the former ways change or exist in parallel. In this chapter, we look at some of the key areas in this body of research. We cannot cover all research done on social media in a single chapter, but as researchers seeking to start projects in social media communication, there are a set of themes that provide the basis for grasping how and why we might want to ask questions about it. As the Internet matured, it soon became clear that the knowledge people want, have the capacity for, or will even tolerate, may be selective. Not everyone seems to want to be connected to certain other kinds of people. It also became clear that there were great profits to be made by those who provided the technical infrastructures through which people were steered through all these sites and information. And, as with older forms of media and communication, those who best understand it and know how to use it may come to have more influence.

In this chapter, the themes we look at all relate to these basic issues. Researchers show how they raise issues about political participation and social justice, but also call us, most importantly, to understand more about the actual nature of social media communication per se. All these issues can feed into any social media communications research project, and this chapter is also intended as a resource to foster research ideas and to provide a springboard for journeys into more specific areas of interest.

We certainly may not want, or need to cite, much of this research, but as researchers we need to know what kinds of issues and questions are being raised by communications scholars as being important in regard to social media. Many of the issues we will want to investigate in our own projects are likely to touch on some of these questions in different ways. Research is all about contributing to knowledge, and the assembled body of knowledge should act as a resource of guiding principles and ideas to help you better formulate your own ideas.

Social media and voices from below

One area of research on social media has related to its potential to allow voices formerly lacking a platform to now speak, be heard, come together, share ideas and interests, and mobilize (Castells, 2015). The impact of hashtags such as #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter are typically listed as examples of how this process can bring injustices into wider public view, creating pressure to make perpetrators accountable, and even lead to challenges of power relations (Bouvier and Cheng, 2019). Researchers provide compelling examples from a range of international contexts (Florini, 2014; Tufekci, 2017; Jackson et al., 2020).

Following is a post using the #MeToo hashtag:

Change is coming to the U.S. House today: Lawmakers voting to add House Rule to explicitly prohibit lawmakers from having sexual relationships with staffers. Makes it an Ethics violation to do so. Part of broader effort to change culture of Capitol Hill following #metoo movement

Here we see that the hashtag presents a voice that formerly had no clear outlet. Mainstream media may have a number of reasons for not wanting to address accusations of sexual misconduct. This could be through fears of legal reprisals, or simply that media organizations are often run by men. This hashtag allowed many women to recount experiences where formerly they had felt alone. Since this time, many have questioned the nature and success of #MeToo, for instance, that while its basic driving message may have been important, it became too broad, unfocused, and was elitist (Zarkov, 2018). Yet ultimately, we could argue that issues of sexual conduct by men towards women and women’s rights take a higher profile now, at least in some societies.

Other research shows how social media have been used by activists in democratic movements around the world. In particular, Twitter has been used as a tool to help disseminate information and to organize in protests in the Middle East (Bruns et al., 2013; Jansen, 2010), and to negotiate state control of media and censorship (Penney and Dadas, 2013; Poell and Van Dijck, 2015), such as in Turkey (Tufekci, 2017) and in China (Yang, 2014).

Other scholars have focused more specifically on political participation in the form of protests. Valenzuela et al. (2012), for example, looked at protest behavior among young people, noting that social media facilitates access to contacts, which makes it possible for movements to get off the ground and come into the public eye. Simply, social media platforms can provide information in a single central place as a sort of rallying point, which can inspire a sense of focus. These platforms can facilitate the formation of collective identities, which, the authors argue, is an important feature of protest behavior (2012: 303).

How does this translate to actually getting people to participate in protests? Bosch (2017: 224) noted that social media have enabled protest participation by increasing users’ possibilities to engage in collective action, such as organizing protests, creating petitions, strategizing to put together writing campaigns that put pressure on companies, etc. One important feature allowing this, Penney and Dadas (2013) argue, is Twitter’s horizontally structured organization that is non-hierarchical and has peer-to-peer communication, which is particularly useful for the coordination of users and events of social movements.

One simple example of a petition-like use of social media is the #StopFundingHate hashtag. This hashtag was created to address the notion that the British press was anti-immigration. Its purpose was to raise awareness about companies that advertised with these titles. Here we see a tweet by the toy company Lego that aligns with the hashtag:

Replying to @StopFundingHate we have finished the agreement with The Daily Mail and are not planning any future promotional activity with the newspaper

Others used the hashtag to bring attention to wider forms of racism in the media. Here we see how Facebook (posted on Twitter) carries racist posts about the Roma (Figure 1.1). The idea is that the hashtag becomes a way to call attention to how media organizations can be part of sustaining racist attitudes. At the time of this writing, the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls was also receiving much international attention. This hashtag was set up when 276 Nigerian schoolgirls were kidnapped by Boko Haram in 2019. At the top right (Figure 1.2), we see Michelle Obama showing her allegiance.

Figure 1.1 Tweet aligning with the hashtag #StopFundingHate

Figure 1.2 Tweet aligning with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls

Such hashtags can all be thought of in terms of voices from below, calls for action and justice, or raising awareness of cruelty, abuse, and inequalities in a manner facilitated by social media.

The possibility to carry a range of media formats, including images and film clips, on social media such as Twitter has also been pointed to as being hugely helpful in increasing the scope and potential impact of its messages. In the case of #BringBack-OurGirls, it was possible to spend hours looking at different kinds of content. Users can then share fragments of film clips, news footage, and images as part of creating mobilization (Gleason, 2013). Such hashtags can interlink with others carrying related concerns, which together can bring more users into participation around a core principle. For example, there was cross-posting on #BringBackOurGirls from a range of other hashtags related to sex trafficking of young women, such as #RealMenDont-BuyGirls (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Tweet aligning with the hashtag #RealMenDontBuyGirls

#BringBackOurGirls brought about major international attention and intervention from America. Yet this campaign ultimately did not bring back the girls. While we might argue that these hashtags raise awareness and can play a role in shifting attitudes, others, in this instance, suggest that hashtags can be a kind of ‘clicktivism’ (Dean, 2010). The situation in Nigeria is complex, often grossly simplified by Western media as being about religion and terrorism, and these kidnappings have been and are still ongoing (Shearlaw, 2015). In fact, as we look at the research areas in this chapter, we learn more regarding how to think about and approach these kinds of issues of engagement and impact, but what is also clear is that we need more research about individual cases and different contexts. Nevertheless, scholars have reminded us that social media technology with its possibilities for creating these dynamic, interlinking communities must not be confused with having a set of users who are well informed and civically aware, nor that people have the motivation and commitment to go beyond the act of posting their outrage on social media (Bakardjieva, 2009, 2010).

Researchers have also shown that social media can equally be used to share ideas and mobilize people around ideas that are much less related to social justice and democratic ideals (Creemers, 2017). This can be where authoritarian regimes use platforms to steer discussions and embed information (MacKinnon, 2011). Social media has also been an important tool for organizations promoting extremist ideas and violence, or looking to radicalize potential recruits (Gentleman, 2011; Huey, 2015). More right-wing groups are also using social media to promote their ideas and attack ethnic minorities (Heikkilä, 2017). Matamoros-Fernández (2017) has, in particular, looked at the relatively unregulated way that racism takes place across many social media platforms. We have already seen one example of this on the #StopFundingHate hashtag, where Facebook users come together to share racist comments about Roma travelers. This may not necessarily be in more overt forms that are so easily picked up as hate speech. Breazu and Machin (2021), carrying out research into racism against the Roma across social media platforms, show how much of this takes place in ways that are less easy to control. Here is an example from their data, where users post under a news clip reporting on a Roma village being quarantined during the Covid pandemic:

I would put everyone in construction and agriculture … Including those from gangs … Why put them in jail so that we pay for everything … Isolation at Home … and work for the benefit of the state … Foot chains … with GPS … and you’ll see how good they turn to be after 3 years of hard work.

Running through these comments, the authors show, is a clear sense that users feel the Roma are a social problem, they are lazy, and they need to be controlled – here by forced labor and foot chains. While YouTube can be quite strict with overt forms of racism in posted videos, users are free to leave these kinds of comments.

For media and communications researchers, this idea that we can now have voices from below, whether more democratic or more intolerant, brings a new set of possibilities (KhosraviNik, 2017). Formerly, knowledge and what we can call dominant ideologies were disseminated top-down by mainstream news media. In other words, the model of the world found in the news, on television, and in movies tended to carry representations of events, persons, and processes that were less critical of the status quo. This model is linked to being owned by corporations, and therefore needing to align with the interests of advertisers, or being operated by the state. For example, the news media have been observed to be generally xenophobic (Van Dijk, 1998), supportive of Western governments in military conflicts (Bouvier, 2014), and simply take business and global capitalism for granted (Hertz, 2002). A former task for critical discourse analysis and other media and communications scholars has been to reveal how these ideologies are buried in media texts. With social media comes the opportunity to consider how these ideologies are taken on by ordinary people, how they are challenged or negotiated, and how these ideologies exist across platforms (KhosraviNik, 2017). However, as Bouvier and Way (2021) argue, the question should rather be to ask what ideologies are embedded in any instance of communication. Even where we appear to deal with a ‘voice from below’ (e.g., a social justice movement that appears to offer a challenge to a form of social inequality), to what extent do these communications carry, at their roots, forms of ideas and thinking that reflect the logics of the dominant ideology?

In terms of research, we are clearly still finding out how ideas and the mobilization of communities take place on and through social media. What kinds of communities come together, for what reasons, and how? The research that follows in this book also gives us clues about other things we need to bear in mind as we do so. These call us to question what we mean by communities and to think more carefully about the extent to which they are coherent and what participation in them looks like. We also need to think about what kinds of community voices come to the surface, and why.

Nodes and echo chambers

Social media platforms can facilitate the formation of communities or networks of connections. As we saw earlier, this can mean that we can link up with others who share our interests and concerns. This affordance, to link people, even those scattered around the planet, has been explored by researchers. This can be how local communities come together around a specific issue (Medina and Diaz, 2016). It can relate to how refugees maintain contact while in different transit camps (Charmarkeh, 2013), or how a global diaspora creates community (Conversi, 2012). Such research often ties into the more optimistic view of social media and its possibilities for bringing people together. While some pointed to the limitations of the #MeToo or #BringBack-OurGirls hashtags, these can bring people together in new ways and yield new opportunities. Although, of course, we might also find communities that have extremist or violent views may come together.

One observation about such communities or networks of connections is that they can tend to be rather ‘nodal’ and insular (KhosraviNik, 2017). In other words, on social media we tend to be attracted to, or at least channeled towards, those who share similar outlooks and ideas (Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). And in one sense, it has been suggested, social media is a kind of consumer-centric medium since we shop around, finding the things and opinions that best please us (Khamis et al., 2016: 4).

Such nodes have also been talked about in ...