Qualitative Social Media Research Workshop

Hosted by Jenna Drenten, Ph.D.

About the Workshop

Modern life is deeply intertwined with social media—people share life stories on YouTube, offer political opinions on Twitter, post hashtagged selfies on Instagram, and ‘go viral’ in an instant on TikTok. As online and offline spaces increasingly converge, social media platforms offer opportunities to better understand society. In the midst of the global coronavirus pandemic, potential for digital fieldwork and qualitative social media methods have become even more important.

While quantitative tools and metrics for analyzing social media are important, they do not account for lived experiences or symbolic meaning within the data. Studying social media through interpretive methods is critical to understanding culture, beyond automated analytics. For instance, on image-based sites like Instagram, what users say in their captions complement what they show in their photos. Therefore, text analyses alone may not fully capture the meaning embedded within social media images.

The aim of this workshop is to equip attendees with skills to collect, analyze, and interpret qualitative data from mainstream social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook – and non-traditional social media platforms (e.g., Venmo, Cameo).

Drawing on interpretive methods, we will address the following:

• Benefits and opportunities for engaging in qualitative social media analyses for sociocultural inquiry

• Methods for capturing and managing qualitative social media data (e.g., automated and manual tools for data downloading, digital fieldwork, ethical data management, troubleshooting API roadblocks)

• Approaches for examining qualitative social media data (e.g., narrative analysis, autodriving, visual analysis)

• Critical questions around ethics and privacy in collecting, managing, and reporting qualitative social media research