Читать книгу Handbook of Web Surveys - Jelke Bethlehem - Страница 23

Wells and Thorson (2015) introduce a novel method that combines a “big data” measurement of the content of individuals' Facebook (FB) news feeds with traditional survey measures to explore the antecedents and effects of exposure to news and politics content on the site. This hybrid approach is used to untangle distinct channels of public affairs content within respondents' FB news feeds.

The authors explore why respondents vary in the extent to which they encounter public affairs content on the website. Moreover, they examine whether the amount and type of public affairs content flows in one's FB are associated with political knowledge and participation above and beyond self‐report measures of news media use.

To combine a survey with measurements of respondents' actual FB experiences, they created a FB application (“app”) and embedded it within an online survey experience.

Respondents, undergraduates at a large Midwestern public university, visited a web page and gave two sets of permissions: they first consented to be participants in a research study—a form required by the institutional review board—and then they separately approved the app through their FB profile. Once they approved the app, they were returned to the survey to complete the questionnaire. While respondents completed the questionnaire, the app recorded specific elements of their FB experience (with respondents' permission), such as how many friends they had, what pages they followed, and what content appeared in their news feeds during the previous week. When respondents had completed the survey, the app had finished its work and automatically removed itself from respondents' profiles. This research was approved by a standard university institutional research board and was designed to comply with FB's Platform Policies and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, each of which placed restrictions on the use and presentation of the data.

The resulting database offers an original combination of respondent's self‐reported attitudes and media behaviors (including FB experience) with measure of part of their FB experience.

From the statistical point of view, the study has limitations (Beręsewicz et al., 2018; Biffignandi and Signorelli, 2016). The empirical study is run on a small sample of college volunteers. Thus, they have no claim of representativeness. In addition they have considered only a single information platform (FB). Other limitations suggest to consider the results just as a first experimental research. However, the approach proposed is in line with interesting methodological innovations toward the combination of social media trace with conventional methods. It opens the perspective to better understand big data and then try to relate big data descriptive information to socioeconomic theoretical hypotheses.

Obviously, it is underlined that the statistical perspective of representativeness of the results should be considered in future studies. No probability‐based sample ad coverage limitations (partial coverage and possibility of duplications) mine to the generalization of the results. New methodological solutions need to be adopted for representativeness of these interesting preliminary results.