Social media research in the global north is primarily focused on western social media platforms, notably Twitter and Facebook. In this post Shulin Hu describes how researchers have used data from Weibo, China’s second most popular social media platform, to undertake a variety of research projects and provides resources for researchers looking to use Weibo … Continued
Category: digital methodologies
Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (2019)
Twitter and other social media platforms represent a large and largely untapped resource for social data and evidence. In this post, Wasim Ahmed updates his recurring series on the Impact Blog, to bring you the latest developments in digital methods and methodologies for researching Twitter and other social media platforms. This post builds upon the 2015, and 2017 editions of […]
Engaging with sensor-based methods for social sciences research is necessary, overdue and potentially rewarding
Sensors are an important source of big data. Developments at the heart of “smart cities” or the exploding “quantified self” movement are all reliant on sensors. However, attempts by social scientists to engage with sensors from a methodological perspective have been rare. Jörg Müller argues that such engagement is not only necessary and overdue, but also potentially rewarding. It’s important […]
Patient experience feedback: we need to engage with the issues of using Big Data methods to capture the human voice
The NHS regularly asks its patients to complete surveys reporting on the quality of care they have received. These surveys include opportunities for patients to submit feedback in their own words. Carol Rivas describes how computational and digital methods can be used to analyse and report patient feedback in an efficient and timely manner. However, it is important to recognise […]