Doing social media research

In this chapter I discuss some of the data that is created by social media use and how an educational researcher might collect that data through using social media and some of the complications relating to this. To do this a project, which used the social media site, Facebook, as the site for the research, is used as an example, to discuss some of these complexities. The chapter begins with a discussion of data available via social media – a short review of ‘big data versus deep data’ it then looks in more detail at social media ‘spaces’ and ‘places’ and how learners might use these. It then goes on to note some ethical concerns that collecting data using social media sites may throw up. The chapter ends with the Facebook study example highlighting some key methods and reflections on using these - one of the challenges of writing this chapter is the fast pace of change of social media platforms and their use.