In search of lost profiles: The reliability of vkontakte data and its importance in educational research

Abstract

The potential of VKontakte (VK), the Russian equivalent of Facebook, as a data source is now acknowledged in educational research, but little is known about the reliability of data obtained from this social network and about its sampling bias. Our article investigates the reliability of VK data, using the examples of a secondary school (766 students) and a university (15,757 students). We describe the procedure of matching VK profiles to real students. Direct matching permitted us to identify the profiles of around 18% of students. A special technique offered in the article increased this number up to 88% for school students and up to 93% for university students. We compared age, gender and GPA of identified students and those whom we did not find on VK. We also compared the structure of social relationships, retrieved from VK data, to the expected structure of students' social ties. We found that the structure of "virtual" social relationships reproduced both the socio-demographic division of students into grades, years of study or majors, and the spatial division into different school buildings or university campuses. To our knowledge, it is the first study of this kind and scale based on VK data. It contributes to the understanding of how reliable data from this SNS is, how its accuracy can be improved, and how it can be used in educational research.