Qualitative Analysis of Social Media Data

Abstract

Society has become thoroughly mediatised. Every aspect and part of society from the economy, politics and education to civil society and everyday social relations is immersed by media. Today we have the internet, smart phones, apps, social network services, blogs, email, and other social media platforms. Social media has brought changes to the way we inform, communicate with others, learn, play and socialize. Most people are quite well connected and communicate with others and while being connected they obtain, organize, produce and share information on a regular basis. These common routinely activities generate a large amount of information and knowledge of different forms, much of it created by 'ordinary people'. This information is generally referred as digital social data which is potentially of great interest to social scientists (Sloan and Quan-Haase, 2017). From the emergence of the internet, both quantitative and qualitative research have been interested in analysing digital data for its endeavour. As social media have enlarged the size and variety of the traces of social actors' actions and expressions, the analytical possibilities available for social science researchers have been reshaped too. This has brought to the fore the necessity of methodological innovations and interdisciplinary collaboration for the study of social media data. Conversely, this digital turn has generated lively debates about its potential to know the contemporary social world. While at the beginning of internet research scholars tended to study social life online as a separated from 'real life', researchers disputed this and argued the need for online social life to be viewed as an integral part of social life (Beneito-Montagut, 2011). Nevertheless, linking social media data to what is going on offline is still one of the challenges of digital social science research.Most of the methodological innovations have been made regarding the analysis of big data and technological tools to make sense of it, but not much has been said about how to qualitatively analyse social media data. This chapter deals with the analysis of social media data and offers a framework which considers the limits and challenges that this kind of data poses. Rather than offering a prescriptive method, it attempts to document the reflective process to incorporate social media data to qualitative research projects considering how we extract meaning from them. So, it is presented as a toolkit to start thinking about the analytical process instead of a universally applicable model. The aim is to link the analysis of social media data to well-stablished research paradigms, instead of reinventing them. Modes and media. Multimodality and multimedialityThe first section brings some definitions to set together the differences and common grounds of two terms: multimodal and multimedia. We will also put these two concepts in relation to the digital context and explain the reasons why we use multimedia. Yet suggesting multimodal research as a useful analytical framework...