Fieldwork in the Era of Social Media: Opportunities and Challenges
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
This paper highlighted the potential in social networking sites for recruiting participants and gathering data and looked at the impact sites such as Facebook have had on building and maintaining trust with research participants, and explored how social media may compromise one's ability to uphold the "do no harm" principle guiding all academic research by jeopardizing participants' confidentiality and anonymity.Abstract:
Social networking sites have recently garnered academic attention for their role in fostering democracy and openness in both developed and developing regions. Unfortunately, in political science, this newfound interest has not yet translated into a greater interest in social media as a methodological tool for researchers conducting fieldwork. How has the era of social media influenced the way political scientists conduct their fieldwork? How can researchers make the most of the opportunities offered by social networking sites while abiding by the strict standards of their ethics board? This article highlights the potential in social networking sites for recruiting participants and gathering data and looks at the impact sites such as Facebook have had on building and maintaining trust with research participants. In contrast, it explores how social media may compromise one's ability to uphold the “do no harm” principle guiding all academic research by jeopardizing participants' confidentiality and anonymity, a risk deemed especially high for vulnerable populations or sensitive regions. Insight gleaned from the researcher's own fieldwork in two minority provinces of Indonesia in 2010–2011 is used as a case in point.read more
Citations
More filters
The Networked China Researcher: Challenges and Possibilities in the Social Media Age
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss how digital technologies, in particular social media platforms, have changed the ways many of us conduct research, gather information, and interact with informants, and the possibilities and challenges, including the new ethical issues that arise as a result of our digital connectivity.
Proceedings ArticleDOI
Are you really one of us?: Exploring Ethics, Risk and Insider Research in a Private Facebook Community
TL;DR: This paper uses Lee-Treweek & Linkogle's four-part framework for understanding researcher risk, and presents in this instance that the risk of social isolation faced by the researcher was too significant to proceed with the study.
Journal ArticleDOI
Ethical Issues in Social Media Recruitment for Clinical Studies: Ethical Analysis and Framework
TL;DR: In this article , the authors provide a comprehensive overview of the ethical benefits and risks to be considered for social media recruitment in clinical studies and develop practical recommendations on how to implement these considerations.
Journal ArticleDOI
Methodological Insights Experiencing and knowing in the field: an autoethnographic account of conducting audit fieldwork in China
TL;DR: In this paper, a researcher's account of fieldwork experience in conducting audit research in China is described in a first-person voice using autoethnography as its overall epistemology.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Networked China Researcher
TL;DR: The authors discusses the possibilities and challenges of using Chinese social media platforms and calls for an explicit reflexivity on rapidly changing technologies, and also addresses the fact that the researcher leaves many digital footprints on the internet and social media, and the advantages and possible dangers in an authoritarian society such as China.
References
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
Opening Closed Regimes: What was the Role of Social Media during the Arab Spring?
TL;DR: This paper studied the role of social media in the Arab Spring and found that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Middle East and that a spike in online revolutionary conversations often preceded major events on the ground.
Book
Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a survey of figures and tables from the history of East Timor, including critical junctures, nationalism and ethnic violence, including exclusion, marginality and the nation.
Posted Content
Mobility and Human Development in Indonesia
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors examine the connection between migration and its wider social and economic contexts, looking at how politics shape migration policy and in turn, how migration affects policy making, and discuss at length recent issues of overseas labor migration, particularly on the apparently embedded inertia within the policy making processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Effects of untreated syphilis in the negro male, 1932 to 1972: A closure comes to the Tuskegee study, 2004
TL;DR: The last survivor of the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis (TSUS) made the above remark shortly before his death, describing why he participated in a research project that nowadays, just a few decades later, is not even conceivable as mentioned in this paper.