Facebook and young parents, a how to build a conceptual framework

The idea for my research project to look at young parents (those aged 18-25) use of Facebook.

My reasoning for choosing this specific group is simply through the observation of the field of SNS research concentrating mainly on student groups - and I think non-students may have a very different experience of using SNS for socialising and support - especially young parents who I've seen posting status update after status update about their children! I've tried to look for other research about young parents social support and there doesn't seem to be much focus on young parents social support, especially online social support. Consequently I think there may be an under researched area here.

I'd like to do an exploratory qualitative study, but at the moment I'm struggling to see how I can formulate research questions, so if you have any idea of open questions regarding Facebook as a social function or Facebook as a support function that'd be great.

Offhand I can think of people doing research on use of the internet and online communities for health information and social support, mostly with an emphasis on social capital. An example sequence of readings could go like this:

• Strauss, A. L., Fagerhaugh, S., Suczek, B., & Wiener, C. (1997). Social organization of medical work. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction. (Originally published in 1985 by University of Chicago Press.) Chapter 8: The Work of Patients (pp. 191-209). (Negotiation of patients and medical personnel with technology; cooperative work; legitimate peripheral participation; power relationships)

• Pettigrew, K. E. (2000). Lay information provision in community settings: How community health nurses disseminate human services information to the elderly. Library Quarterly, 70(1), 47-85. (Information ecology; social networks; information flow)

• Orgad, S. (2005). The transformative potential of online communication: The case of breast cancer patients’ Internet spaces. Feminist Media Studies, 5(2), 141-161. (Online communities; social capital; invisibility; power)

Now I know you’re not necessarily interested in health, but it’s the same kind of idea – find an older and broad set of ideas or theories (social inclusion, strength of ties, what it means to be a parent, communities of practice or maybe imagined communities, etc…) and then maybe connect them to a discipline or area of study (information science, communication, education, psychology) and build up to a specific example or site of research (Facebook, for instance).

As for the differences in FB use by cultural group I’d say there’s a great deal of work to be done – most SNS research has been on privacy and youth, and as the major immersive college student user base moves on to the work and young adult world (what you’re experiencing) and the system broadens its scope to new countries and late adopters join (parents, middle-aged women in particular) we’re likely to see a complicating of context and diversifcation of social norms – and an even more pressing need for study.

Body Image and Methods

I am currently working on an image event for my women's studies class in which we are to raise awareness about an issue we've studied in a visually-dominate manner. Our group's idea is to send people to a facebook group (not yet created) that will compare body images of men to women, showing the societal disparity. Before we begin our work on the actual creation of our image(s) we must write a proposal with research on research methods. I was wondering if you would be able to supply any info regarding facebook?

So I don't feel like I have enough information about your project to be helpful. Facebook groups can be a great place to bring people together to share ideas and discuss concepts on forums, they have the advantage (and sometimes disadvantage) of people owning pre-existing accounts that pretty accurately and comprehensively represent their identities. I imagine this project could go in many ways - your research methods should best match your research questions and individual competencies as researchers.

For instance you might do qualitative content analysis (discourse analysis) on the discussions and reactions people have with regards to different pictures. What do people say about them? Does this relate to aspects of their identity (gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity)? How does language choice shape the way people think and talk about body image? Does the discourse only happen in some forms, or does it privilege or disempower some participants? Who's not even involved in the discourse, and does that matter? Is there a history to these relationships or conceptions? This sort of approach would better match people well-versed in literary critical analysis.

Or you might instead post some pictures in the group, ask a bunch of people to look at them, and then conduct interviews or a survey after. Interviews could help to discern how people make sense of the pictures - what their impressions where, what they meant to them or how they spoke. A survey would be more suited to gathering general perspectives, but would constrain their responses to whatever questions and answers the survey designers choose, which could make data uniform and easy to analyze, but also incomplete or reduce its validity.

I think most importantly you should give some thought to picking key research questions. From there you can decide if you want to go about your work inductively (observing what's going on and looking for themes) or deductively (starting with a theory and testing it). Mixing these two methods might be possible, but could be very difficult (and ill-advised) within the same study for a number of reasons.

Automated Data Collection Strategies on Groups

I am a researcher in [a country] working on a Facebook-based, agenda-setting study. Ideally, I would like to perform an analysis of participation in a specific, public FB group but I have run into a snag. I am trying to capture all of the content on the FB group's wall without resorting to tedious copy and paste methods. Do you know of anyone who has successfully worked with this type of data set or how one would go about automating the copying process?

As far as I know it’s not possible to use webcrawlers or automated data collection programs with Facebook – they have mechanisms built into the site to block or ban users who exhibit inhuman tendencies (like being able to follow a hundred links at a time). Offhand I can think of two workarounds, though. I believe you can set Facebook Page (as in the Facebook Pages platform application, a front/service used by companies and other stakeholders - http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages) to push out to an RSS feed. I think that’ll only capture wall content put up by the page operators, however. The other way you might go about it could be to write a client-side script with Greasemonkey and Firefox or something similar. I think ideally you’d have to visit the page to download it and then perform some kind of programmatic operation on it to sort or refine the data. It might be possible to write a script that could be used in conjunction with a user account that’s always logged on – it would refresh the page say every hour, download it, parse through the code to record the posts, stopping if it encounters an identical one, and appending the text into a file. Lots of work but it might be possible to do without flagging Facebook’s bot-catching mechanisms.

Honestly I haven’t done anything like this so I’d suggest you try contacting Eric Gilbert (at UIUC) or Fred Stutzman (UNC Chapel Hill) and asking them, they’re quite a bit more familiar with the security and programming side of Facebook research.

Compliments and Comments on Facebook

I am currently writing, or trying to write a paper on compliment responses in the facebook context, which is for my Masters programme. i am practically going bonkers trying to figure out and collect the data for my paper. so, i am hoping that u cud help me. is there any researchers doing a paper on communication in facebook or compliment responses in facebook? and it would b great if u cud give me some tips or points on this matter. thank u very very much

I’m not sure if I understand what you mean when you say ‘compliment responses.’ Are you referring to the comments people can leave in response to posted statements, links and media?

Regardless, I think the question of the best way to collect data is a good one. You should probably pick a research method that fits your research questions and approach. If you have a hypothesis you’d like to test you might think about laying it out in explicit statement form and then determining the criteria or variables that would apply. For instance, you might copy and paste several pages of Facebook wall posts from your newsfeed into a text file and then count the number of times people respond to each other, anticipating that, say, the more a person posts the more likely they are to get responses. You could deepen the analysis by codifying certain words as tied to a type of emotion and then look for changes in the amount of type of responses between individuals. This sort of thing would be done programmatically, and be considered to be a quantitative content analysis. You’d have to be careful about what you say about your results, in this case there would be sample limitations.

Alternatively you might not worry about getting a lot of data, but instead looking closely at a small amount of data to see what it presents. I suspect this angle might work better for you since you seem to be unsure of the best way to go about your project. If you work inductively, and start by making a lot of observations of something you can eventually start to find consistencies and ongoing themes. With enough observation you can begin to construct theories of the greater narratives afoot. For instance, you might take a selection of wall post exchanges that involve comments that happen to be compliments and see what they say. Are they usually initiated by people of one gender? Are the compliments mostly about one type of thing, like a person’s appearance? What might these exchanges say about the discourse of compliments, or the way people think about complimenting one another? The goal here would not be to make global statements based on generalizable data, but instead to help shed some light on the way some people make sense of things or what compliments implicitly mean to them. Or how people are able to give and receive compliments on Facebook.