An Interview with Steve Jones: An Editor’s Viewpoint on Research and Social Media

By Janet Salmons, PhD  #einterview

We have heard researchers’ voices throughout NSMNSS events, Tweetchats and blog posts. Students, alt-academic independent researchers, respected scholars and research institute staff have discussed wide-ranging methodological and ethical issues associated with media-related research. Publication is an important next step for any researcher, one we have not yet explored in the NSMNSS project. To introduce an editor’s perspective into the mix I asked New Media & Society editor Dr. Steve Jones to share some insights.

New media was indeed new in 1999 when Dr. Jones and colleagues Nicholas Jankowski, Rohan Samarajiva and Roger Silverstone launched New Media & Society. With appreciation for the potential of emerging ways and means of communication they sought to create an international, interdisciplinary journal that could “contribute to the social, cultural and political understanding of new media and information technologies” (Jankowski, Jones, Samarajiva, & Silverstone, 1999, p. 5).  Entering its fifteenth year and Volume 16, this Sage Publications journal is going strong.

I initiated the conversation with a broad question: “From your view as editor, what trends do you see in terms of methodology and methods represented in submissions?” Dr. Jones noted that serving as an editor has been “a fascinating position, since when New Media & Society began, social media and networking did not exist.” The editors saw research about MySpace and Friendster, from no particular methodological or disciplinary position. As time passed, research mirrored trends for new media adoption in different parts of the world. Dr. Jones observed an interesting pattern, since much of the submitted research was motivated by the ways the researchers themselves used technology. Researchers wanted to probe more deeply into the new media platforms they used, meaning they had an a priori investment to better understand the online environments where they were already immersed. However, NM & S has not been flooded with manuscripts on each emerging technology trend. While conference presentations tend to center on the latest popular technology, manuscripts submitted have covered a “huge variation of topics and platforms.”

In terms of research approaches, while there is a general awareness of Netnography and online interviews, NM & S submissions tend to use traditional methods such as content analysis, discourse analysis or surveys.  Dr. Jones pointed out that “it is not typical to see innovative methods. I would like to see a greater variety… there could and should be greater awareness of methods used in disciplines other than one’s own, and efforts at complementarity by using multiple methods.”

I asked him why he thought researchers use traditional methods to study new, technology-infused topics? He speculated that the importance of journal impact factors for use in evaluating tenure and promotion decisions in an increasingly competitive job market may influence researchers to use known approaches. It can often take more time to do a study using multiple methods, and given the pressures under which young scholars operate it can be difficult to decide to do anything that would take more time. He suggested that in some ways it is unrealistic to expect younger scholars—the ones in the most precarious positions—to move things forward, in the context of disciplinary and institutional conservatism.

Clearly innovation is hard and takes time, but when taking a long view Dr. Jones was heartened by increasing openness towards new methods and theories and greater willingness to use theories from other fields or disciplines.

Changing the subject slightly, I asked Dr. Jones what he looks for and how evaluates quality in research on or about social media? As editor, he relies on reviewers who are dedicated to supporting a community of scholars. When he reads the submissions and reviews, he looks for three main things:

      1. Did the writer follow the guidelines, word limits etc.? The journal is published in print as well as online, so word limits must be upheld to allow for 8 articles in each issue.

 2. To what degree does the research use or advance theory? NM & S still receives submissions that simply describe the phenomenon, without scholarly attention to theory and methods.

 3. Does the article contribute new knowledge to the field? Of the hundreds of good studies that could pass peer review many make no new points and basically say the same thing. Is the work original, with original ideas, or just a snapshot? In 8 issues with 64 articles per year, space is limited so he looks for articles that contribute in a meaningful way.
 

Given the competitiveness of the selection process, I asked what advice would benefit potential writers. Dr. Jones emphasized that they should “keep going.” Follow the guidelines and “put their best foot forward.” It is unfortunate to see a potentially good submission that with more work could have avoided rejection. “Get the work fully baked, even if that means taking longer. Get informal reviews from peers before submitting.” Get involved by participating, including offering to review.

My take-aways from this conversation with Dr. Jones include a respect for New Media & Society’s mix of new thinking and traditional expectations for solid, high-quality research.  Use the comment area to share your thoughts!

Jankowski, N., Jones, S., Samarajiva, R., & Silverstone, R. (1999). Editorial. New Media & Society, 1(1), 5-9. doi: 10.1177/14614449922225483

Knowledge Exchange Seminar 3

The third Knowledge Exchange Seminar of the New Social Media, New Social Science (NSMNSS) network was held on the 28th of January. The topic for this event was 'Qualitative Research and Social Media' and it brought together specialist speakers to discuss a range of topics, including opportunities and challenges of 'Deep Data', understanding behaviors and networks through the lens of netnography, and the changing role of the qualitative researcher online. We asked a range of contributors to share case studies illustrating their experiences of using qualitative methods in social media research and these were really useful starting points for highlighting the challenges today’s researchers face.

Our first speaker of the day was Janet Salmons, from the Capella University School of Business and Technology, on the opportunities and challenges of ‘Deep Data’. In an era where increasing focus is laid on social media’s potential to provide quantitative researchers with ‘big data’, Janet argues that the challenge for qualitative researchers is still to see data in context and to make meaning from this. Data collection online often blurs the lines between methods such as online interviews, observations and documentary analysis, and this has practical and ethical implications for researchers. Ethics was the topic of our first knowledge exchange seminar and has probably been the strongest thread running through the whole of the network’s activities so far. You can read more about some of the issues raised in previous discussions here: http://www.methodspace.com/group/nsmnss/forum/topics/nsmnss-workshop-3-ethics

A reoccurring question in the discussion following Janet’s presentation was ‘how new and different are the issues and challenges facing social media researchers from those which qualitative (and quantitative researchers) have always faced?’ Informed consent, for example, is not new and revisiting the parameters of informed consent throughout the course of your research is just as important if you’re doing research online or offline. Some of the new challenges lie in questions around the non-neutrality of social media platforms and the increasingly ‘connected’ nature of our digital selves. With just a few clicks, you may be able to access someone’s profile on Facebook which might link you to their LinkedIn profile, which may in turn take you to their Twitter feed. Whether this data is considered public or private is only one of the questions – often we are able to find out more about a person than we’d imagined when using online data sources. For example, harvesting tweets can also tell you what kind of phone someone is tweeting from! We have to keep remembering that these platforms have been set up for a commercial purpose and are collecting data which is valuable for commercial interests- very little is actually known about what users of these platforms think about how this data is used in social research.

The second presentation of the day came from Gachoucha Kretz, from the ISC PARIS School of Management, on netnography and understanding behaviour and networks. Netnography is a method developed by Robert V Kozinets (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book233748) and it provides a framework for studying cultures and communities online. Some of the issues Gachoucha raised were around the challenges of identifying your sample online – she talked about her PhD work on fashion blogs and the difficulty of identifying which blogs were worth studying. You either need to do a search using Google’s ranking and trust an algorithm, or rely on a list of blogs someone else thinks is influential. Other challenges you face when studying online communities is the overwhelming archive of material, the multi –media nature of online data, and the offline relationships and networks which influence the online space but may not be visible online.

Kandy Woodfield of NatCen kicked off the final session on the changing role of the qualitative researcher online. Many of the issues raised in the previous sessions around ethics came up again and there was a strong sense that researchers of today need some new literacies to effectively research in online spaces. For example, how deep does your knowledge of debates around whether distinctions between online and offline are passé need to be? Richard Rogers calls it ‘the end of the virtual’, but you could spend a lifetime just reading about this before embarking on your own online research! What about our knowledge of each individual platform we might study – do you need to be on Twitter to study Twitter? And what new skills are required if we are to take into account multi-media data, given that most online platforms involve words, pictures, video and sound? One of the benefits of online research is the ability it gives us to research globally without physically travelling to each location, but what do researchers need to know about cultural codes of conduct and the varying uses of platforms by different populations?

There were probably more questions raised than answered, but it was a great chance to discuss common challenges and to try to determine ways forward. The network is currently working considering ways to develop and influence ethical guidelines for social media research – we’ll be in touch about this in more detail soon. Please join the conversation, share ideas and potential solutions through the network’s methodspace group (http://www.methodspace.com/profile/NSMNSS). You can also visit the NSMNSS Blog (http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/) to read the latest discussions on social media in the social sciences and to view past videos.