A bright new look on people’s opinions

Vanessa Torres van Grinsven is a researcher at the University of Utrecht.

Opinion surveys: they are all around us. Who hasn’t received a request – by mail, telephone, email or through one of those annoying pop-up windows on websites? 

But, why do researchers even bother? Why are our opinions, our feelings and experiences even important for researchers?

Our opinions matter for a whole lot of purposes: brands perhaps would like to know if and how we appreciate their products. Decision-makers would like to know how we feel about certain policy issues. Social researchers would like to find out, how, for example, people that are ill experience the healthcare system, or how elderly feel about the care they are receiving at retirement homes. One way to find out about these opinions, feelings and experiences is to ask people, like by sending out surveys or doing interviews. 

There are though also other possible ways for doing opinion research. Nowadays, more and more people are becoming increasingly active on social media, like with platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and fora on websites. They write, for example, about what they are doing (“Trying a new recipe for a delicious pie”), what they have experienced (“Guess what happened to me today…”), how they feel (“I feel lucky today”) and what caused those feelings (“…because I got promoted at my job J”). Much of what people write is publicly available – open for anyone to read.

These writings closely resemble day-to-day communications. The same way we have a chat with our neighbour in the morning when we rush out to school, our jobs, etc., we write things on our Facebook and Twitter accounts - small, casual, day to day chats.

Taken all together, these writings have become a useful source for social researchers that want to find out how people really feel and think about things, and how they experience them. I recently undertook research to explore people’s feelings and ideas about, and experiences with, a national semi-governmental organization. I wanted to do that without burdening them with the job of filling in a survey or having to take time to have an interview with me. Doing an analysis of postings on social media gave seemingly relevant insights into these feelings, ideas and experiences.

For my analysis, I was able to use all public posts for a period of about two years. Like this, I could apply the “principle of total accountability” [1], that is, accounting for all the instances of the phenomena under investigation, which aids in its objectivity and representativeness.

Though being an innovative approach, recently more and more researchers are using social media as an important data source. These data may not be representative for a whole society. But, at least, using and analyzing these new types of data can offer us a first image upon which to further construct our research.

On the other hand, social media postings may possibly be an even more realistic account of people’s opinions than surveys or interviews, as all these posts were written down spontaneously, without anybody asking for it. There is no influence of the researcher on what is posted. Besides, according to media researchers, the modern social media can be seen as a new cultural forum, and as such they may be a repository and a resource articulating and negotiating meanings and world views on behalf of the culture at large.

Modern social media open up new doors as a datasource for researchers, and create additional possibilities to listen to people and what they really want.


[1] Leech, G. (1992) ‘Corpora and Theories of Linguistic Performance’, in J. Svartvik (ed.) Directions in Corpus Linguistics: Proceedings of the Nobel Symposium 82, Stockholm, 4–8 August 1991, pp. 105–22. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Calling all participants! Recruitment through LinkedIn

Wilma Garvin is currently undertaking research into organisation development and the role of women in business in the 21st century and lectures at the Docklands Business School, University of East London. 

My research was to review approaches to organization development in multinationals and government departments in order to create specific case studies. The method used was to undertake face to face and telephone interviews. Sampling using probability sampling seemed a logical approach since the objective was to interview Heads of Organisation Development (OD) or similar i.e. senior people responsible for Organisation Development.

Linkedin was used as the social media. I use Linkedin on a regular basis and I am a member of several OD networks. It seemed like the ideal way to identify and make contact with potential participants. Therefore, the opportunity was already being in OD networks and having contacts either in OD or with contacts in their networks in OD. The challenge was using these in order to find potential participants. These methods of making contact with people through Linkedin were as follows:

- Posting a message with some details of the research in the group area and asking people to contact me

- Asking direct contacts to make an introduce me to a specific person in their network

In using Linkedin, as one source of participants the challenges were:

Ethics: while people voluntarily post their business details on Linkedin, it did seem as if it might be seen as a low level form of stalking by using Linkedin to search for potential participants. Waskul and Douglas (1996 p131) have identified online interaction as neither public or private but as the ‘privately public’ and the ‘publicly private’.

Another challenge was the expectation that there would be a positive response from each of the people in my network to introducing me to their contacts. Some contacts took action immediately even though the contact was on a 3rd level. In a few instances, my contact did not respond and took no action. Where people did try to introduce me to their contacts, the contact declined to participate.

Sampling: Using Linkedin for the sampling frame might be seen as valid although only those who have been a conscious decision to be on Linkedin will be found. This means that the list will be incomplete as it will not represent the whole community of OD specialists.

Linkedin is a public environment and so the people there have chosen to present certain information publicly and so this overcomes some of the ethical issues. It was only being used as a way to contact experts in the field and therefore there would be informed consent. The message posted on the discussion boards provided enough detail and then further details were provided as follow up and in advance of the interviews. However, posting a message on the discussion boards might have been seen as an inappropriate use of the community (Eysenbach and Till 2001).

With regard to ethics, there was also the personal feeling that looking at people’s profile before asking a contact to make an introduction seemed like invasion of privacy may be the change from the ‘old’ attitudes to the new public environment of the internet.

With regard to sampling, it seemed as if self- selection non-probability sampling had to be accepted. On the positive side, it might have been difficult to identify a database of OD specialists since the job titles of OD practitioners can be very different and so using Linkedin does provide a way to identify who these are by drawing on knowledge of the job titles used and the access to Linkedin groups.

The resources used were the knowledge of OD, contacts and specialist groups and the knowledge of using social media.

Linkedin and other social media platforms provide a way to make contact with professionals in specific categories who are willing to take place in research. While self-selection does take place, this can be seen as a positive aspect since the people who did volunteer were passionate about their subject area and were keen to share but also saw it as a way to learn from others.

References

Bakardjieva, M. and Feenberg, A (2001) Involving the virtual subject, Ethics Information Technology, Vol 2:4, p233-240

Eysenbach, G. and Till, J.E. (2001) Ethical issues in qualitative research on internet communities, British Medical Journal, Vol. 323, p1103-5

Waskul, D. and Douglass, M. (1996) Considering the electronic participant: some polemical observations on ethics of on-line research, The Information Society, Vol 12:2, p129-139