Collecting data from social networking Web sites and blogs.

Abstract

Networking Web Sites and Blogs 6 his chapter describes the use of social networking Web sites and blogs—two types of social media that can be used produc-tively in behavioral research on the Internet. Social network-ing sites are online venues where members can create and post content to profiles (i.e., lists of demographic information and personal interests constructed by completing forms within the site) and can form personal networks that connect them to others using tools embedded in the social software. Blogs, published either on social networking sites or on separate public hosting Web sites, are reverse-chronological, time-stamped, online journals on a single Web page. More text oriented than social profiles, blogs, like social network pages, are often interconnected; many writers read and link to other blogs, referring to them in their own entries. Because of this trend, the interconnected blogs often become part of social communities with their own culture, often referred to in toto as the blogosphere. The more comprehensive term social media refers to Internet services that facilitate social human con-tact. Besides blogs and social networking sites, social media include the creation and posting of digital material (e.g., photo-graphs, music, videos) on specialized Web sites, personal Web pages, instant messages, online discussion groups, wikis, and virtual worlds. Because of my research experience, potential information overlap with other types of social media, and 77 T http://dx. online social networks' relatively text-based nature, this chapter focuses on social networks and blogs as sources of data. However, I discuss other types of social media when the issues are relevant or the examples use-ful. Specifically, this chapter describes searching for, and sampling from, social network profiles and blogs, human (rather than computer) con-tent coding and analysis, and intercoder reliability. Although researchers may directly contact users of social media, this chapter focuses on non-interfering measures; the topic of direct interaction with users can be found in Johnson (chap. 10, this volume). Although this type of research is unobtrusive, ethical issues are still important (see chap. 16, this vol-ume). In sum, this chapter will be most useful to behavioral scientists who wish to use social networking sites and blogs to unobtrusively study text, music, and image-based data on the Internet. Because content analysis is used extensively in social media research, familiarity with the technique will be helpful. Analysis of social networks and blogs, as well as other social media, will allow you to systematically and objectively analyze textual, visual, and oral content created by large and diverse populations. Researchers can study individuals and groups within a naturalistic setting without the presence of an intrusive researcher. Both quantitative and qualita-tive analyses are possible because social networkers and bloggers create narratives that often disclose information about themselves that offline would normally be part of a slower and more private process of acquain-tanceship but online are posted frequently and often in full public view. Besides the writing of narratives and the sending and receiving of messages, social networking sites and blogs encourage friending (connect-ing with others online, often through network and profile-surfing) and the posting of photos, music, and videos; thus, they can be mined for data on oral and visual culture, presentation of self and identity, language use, and interactive social dynamics, among other topics. Analyses can help answer questions derived initially from observations of offline behavior, as Huffaker and Calvert (2005) and Thiel (2005) demonstrated in their studies of gender influences on identity construction and language use in instant messaging and teenagers' blogs, respectively, and as Richards and Mazur (2008) showed in their comparison of characteristics of adoles-cents' offline and online friendships. Alternatively, researchers can study the specific phenomenon of content creation on the Web, as did Stern (2002) and Mazur and Kozarian (in press) in their analyses of girls' homes pages and young adults' blogs, respectively, as performance and as projections of identity and image. Considered a force in media, entertainment, politics, advertising, and marketing (McCoy, 2008; Stelter, 2008b), online social networks, in particular, are ripe for the study of technology-integrated communi-cation. Thus, researchers may want to directly study processes of