Applying Qualitative Methods to Investigate Social Actions for Justice Using Social Media: Illustrations From Facebook

Abstract

Social media is becoming a valuable resource for hosting activism as illustrated in the rise of the hashtag movements, such as #MeToo and #Endrapeculture, used to speak out against rape culture. In this article, we discuss the use of social media as the source and object of research, using the case of the 2016 South African #nakedprotest. We used naturalistic observation on Facebook comment threads and followed these up with online Facebook focus groups. Qualitative content analysis and thematic decomposition analysis were used, respectively, to explore online discourses of rape culture. We found that the use of social media as a medium for data collection is valuable for exploring trending social issues such as the rape culture #nakedprotest. We uncovered that social media offers researchers the opportunity to collect, analyze, and triangulate rich qualitative data for the exploration of social phenomena. This study illustrates the usefulness of social media as a pedagogical instrument.

“These Women are Making a Statement Against Rape and yet the only Thing Y'All can Focus on is ‘Eww They're Naked’”: Exploring Rape Culture on Facebook in South Africa

“…As such, some of the themes in the matrix were removed and new themes were added to the matrix to better reflect the data. The methodology of this study is described in further detail in another article [34].…”

“…We found that social media may be a valuable tool for researchers, both as a research site and a data collection tool [30,34]. Facebook is considered one of the most popular social networking sites and through this platform, we were able to collect rich qualitative data in a short amount of time.…”

“…Facebook was chosen as a suitable site to conduct the natural observation of the comment section, as it is a popular social media site and the comments were available in the public domain. Considering that the posts were public; there was no need to request access to online communities, nor was there any need to request consent [34,39,40].…”

“…personal, news report, video etc. ), the date posted, the date accessed, the number of shares and reactions [34] and the number of comments. During the data cleaning phase, the comments were copied into a new document, formatted and deidentified by deleting the profile pictures, usernames and any other personal information of the commenters.…”

“…Additionally, as the comments were collected in retrospect, there was no way for us to interact with the users in real-time. However, in another article, we explain how we conducted focus groups on Facebook as a way of triangulating the data [34]. Another point of consideration is related to the gender of the commenters and the language they used to post comments.…”