Question

For each discussion you should fully answer each question with no less than 6-8 sentences per part.

1. What are the potential benefits to conducting research based on social media data?

2. What are the potential risks to using data collected on social media sites?

Answer 1

1

Potential benefits include

• Updated data- Social media gets updated regularly as people post new things every day.
• Holistic and multi-level understanding- Social media data represent different cultures and information about many cultures can be found.
• It directly highlights people emotions and cognitions
• Cost-effective and feasibility- It can be acquired easily just by sitting at home.
• There are different platforms which researcher can switch.
• Detailed analysis where comparisons can be drawn about various criteria.

2

Potential risks to using data collected on social media sites

• It does not come under a standardized date as there is no norms, reliability, and validity
• Data is full of manipulations, errors, and biases.
• Data keeps on changing thus it can create a problem to reach a consensus about something.
• There is a requirement of some resources which might not be available everywhere like the computer, good internet service, software, access to journals and websites, etc
• The data can be flawed and might not represent the whole population
• There is no such empirical training or certain guidelines to use social media data. This practice becomes highly subjective and goes no where.