Defining Social Media Research: Is It Really Naturalistic Survey Research?

January 25, 2011 | Comments Off

Survey research is the collection and analysis of data via surveys.
Focus group research is the collection and analysis of data via focus groups.
Social media research is the collection and analysis of data via social media.

But wait – though we all mean the same thing by survey research and focus group research, we often don’t mean the same thing by social media research. For some people, conducting a type of focus group within a social networking site counts as social media research. For others, collecting a list of people from social media who have agreed to participate in surveys is social media research. And for still others, social media research means collecting and analyzing information about social media itself (e.g., how many people use each site, why they use the sites)

It seems that the only thing in common among all these definitions is that any type of research that originates within the social media space is social media research.

So, what do we call what we do here at Conversition? To be precise, we apply scientific principles to the collection and analysis of social media data. The same types of things that you consider when you run a survey or a focus group are part of our every day work. When we gather naturally occurring conversations from the internet, we consider sampling frames and weighting schemes. We make decisions about the most appropriate Likert scale to use and whether box scores or average scores are the right thing to do. We decide which variables need to be measured in order to answer the research questions. We decide whether category or industry norms are appropriate.

Given that description, what is it that we do? Since we are observing naturally occurring conversations without interfering with the observee’s world, our work is kind of like naturalistic observation, a technique with a long history in psychology and sociology. But then, we’re also surveying opinions by sampling data from millions of observations, and preparing quantitative survey-like variables and datasets that can be popped into your weekly tracker data-tabulation set-up.

So what do you think of the term “Naturalistic Survey Research”? Are we observing the birth of a brand new term in research or am I just making it more complicated? What term do YOU think makes the most sense?
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Related links
Social media monitoring vs social media research: Can you see the difference?
The Conversition Hierarchy of Social Media Insight
How important is sampling? Well, how important is gay marriage?
Tracking the Mood of Americans: Use Twitter if you want to prove they’re happy
The Fantasy of Representative Samples

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