Using social media images as data in social science research

Abstract

We conducted a scoping review to identify and describe trends in the use of social media images as data sources to inform social science research in published articles from 2015 to 2019. The identified trends include the following: (1) there is increasing interest in social media images as research data, especially in disciplines like sociology, cultural studies, communication and environmental studies; (2) the photo sample size is often smaller than that is typically used in text-based social media analysis and usually is collected manually; (3) thematic coding, object recognition and narrative analysis are the most popular analysis methods that are often conducted manually; (4) computer vision and machine-learning technologies have been increasingly but still infrequently used and are not fit for all purposes; and (5) relatively few papers mention ethics and privacy issues, or apply strategies to address ethical issues. We identify noteworthy research gaps, and opportunities to address limitations and challenges.

‘Pretty in Pink’ and ‘Girl Power’: An analysis of the targeting and representation of women in alcohol brand marketing on Facebook and Instagram

“…engagement marketing such as competitions, influencer collaborations) used to target different genders based on the brand's predominant target audience and popularity of the brand among men and women (YouGov, 2021). This involved coding textual and visual content into content categories (Chen et al, 2021). The coding frame was incorporated into an Excel sheet alongside the cleaned data, with a description of each code in an additional sheet for reference.…”

“…A qualitative thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006;Chen et al, 2021) was then conducted to explore the latent messages in both the textual and visual content that was assessed as targeting and/or depicting women. The qualitative analysis excluded posts which were assessed as targeting men that did not refer (in text) to or include images of women.…”

Disguising Reddit sources and the efficacy of ethical research

“…Increasingly, researchers are engaging in site-specific considerations, which requires contextual ethical reasoning, be it at Wikipedia (Pentzold 2017), at sites where "we are studying people who deserve credit for their work" (Bruckman et al, 2015), or public sites where people, nonetheless, discuss sensitive topics or share images (Andalibi et al, 2017;Ayers et al, 2018;Chen et al, 2021;Dym & Fiesler, 2020;Haimson et al, 2016). For example, on Twitter, Fiesler & Proferes (2018) found that "few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent.…”

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“…Each of these platforms includes both textual and photographic data, the latter offering a direct and globally understood 'language' which transcends the spoken word. Further, this dynamic 'in-themoment' view leaves the observer pondering what has gone before and after the image capture; and, crucially, the question of why this particular image has been posted, presenting opportunities for observation by the researcher (Chen et al, 2021).…”