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The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods
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The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

First Edition
Edited by:


January 2017 | 728 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with "big and broad data," from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings. This handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters.

The holistic approach is organized into the following sections:
  • Conceptualizing & Designing Social Media Research
  • Collection & Storage
  • Qualitative Approaches to Social Media Data
  • Quantitative Approaches to Social Media Data
  • Diverse Approaches to Social Media Data
  • Analytical Tools
  • Social Media Platforms
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods is the single most comprehensive resource for any scholar or graduate student embarking on a social media project. 

Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan
01 Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods: Goals, Challenges and Innovations
 
SECTION ONE: CONCEPTUALISING & DESIGNING SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH
Lori McCay-Peet and Anabel Quan-Haase
02 What is social media and what questions can social media research help us answer?
Rob Kitchin
03 Big Data - Hype or Revolution?
Anabel Quan-Haase and Lori McCay-Peet
04 Building interdisciplinary social media research teams: Motivations, challenges, and policy frameworks
Kelsey Beninger
05 Social media users’ views on the ethics of social media research
Shuzhe Yang, Anabel Quan-Haase, Andrew Nevin and Yimin Chen
06 The Role of Online Reputation Management, Trolling, and Personality Traits in the Crafting of the Virtual Self on Social Media
Luke Soan
07 Social Science ‘lite’? Deriving Demographic Proxies from Twitter
 
SECTION TWO: COLLECTION & STORAGE
Philipp Mayr & Katrin Weller
08 Think before you collect: Setting up a data collection approach for social media studies
David M. Brown, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Juan Luis Suárez & Javier de la Rosa
09 The Social Media Data Processing Pipeline
Dietmar Janetzko
10 The Role of APIs in Data Sampling from Social Media
Alex Voss, Ilia Lvov and Sara Day Thomson
11 Data Storage, Curation and Preservation
Janet Salmons
12 Using Social Media in Data Collection: Designing Studies with the Qualitative E-Research Framework
 
SECTION THREE: QUALITATIVE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
Guillaume Latzko-Toth, Claudine Bonneau & Mélanie Millette
13 Small Data, Thick Data: Thickening Strategies for Trace-Based Social Media Research
Martin Hand
14 Visuality in Social Media: researching images, circulations and practices
Diane Rasmussen Pennington
15 Coding of non-text data
Bonnie Stewart
16 Twitter as method: Using Twitter as a tool to conduct research
Alexandra Georgakopoulou
17 Small stories research: a narrative paradigm for the analysis of social media
 
SECTION FOUR: QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
Olga Buchel & Diane Rasmussen Pennington
18 Geospatial Analysis
Shadi Ghajar-Khosravi and Mark Chignell
19 Pragmatics of Network Centrality
Niels Buus Lassen Lisbeth La Cour and Ravi Vatrapu
20 Predictive Analytics with Social Media Data
Victoria L. Rubin
21 Deception Detection and Rumor Debunking for Social Media
 
SECTION FIVE: DIVERSE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
Nadav Hochman
22 From Site-specificity to Hyper-locality: Performances of Place in Social Media
Frauke Zeller
23 Analysing social media data and other data sources: A methodological overview
Jack Jamieson and Jeffrey Boase
24 Listening to social rhythms: Exploring logged interactional data through sonification
Bernhard Klein & Ulf-Dietrich Reips
25 Innovative social location-aware services for mobile phones
 
SECTION SIX: RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL TOOLS
Jeffrey Morgan
26 COSMOS: The Collaborative On-Line Social Media Observatory
Ulf-Dietrich Reips and Pablo Garaizar
27 Social Lab: An “Open Source Facebook”
Simon Hegelich
28 R for Social Media Analysis
Kalina Bontcheva
29 GATE: An Open-Source NLP Toolkit for Mining Social Media
Anatoliy Gruzd , Philip Mai and Andrea Kampen
30 A how-to for using Netlytic to collect and analyze social media data: A case study of the use of Twitter during the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine
Daniel Angus
31 Theme Detection in Social Media
Mike Thelwall
32 Sentiment Analysis
 
SECTION SEVEN: SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS
Dhiraj Murthy
33 The ontology of tweets: Mixed methods approaches to the study of Twitter
Linnea Laestadius
34 Instagram
Xiao Hu, Chen Qiao & King-wa Fu
35 Weibo
Matthew J. Williams and Martin Chorley
36 Foursquare
Jessica Vitak
37 Facebook
Anatoliy Gruzd and Ben O’Bright
38 Big Data and Political Science: The Case of VKontakte and the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine
Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase
39 A Retrospective on State of the Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical decisions, big-small data rivalries and the spectre of the 6Vs

Wow! I'm keeping it right next to my desk. It's the first methods book for the 21st century. I love the way it gives a wide range of specific cases which have broad general implications for doing my - and your - research.

Barry Wellman
Professor of Sociology, University of Toronto

Understanding social media is key to understanding contemporary public life. What you have in this fabulously curated book is a collection of important insights on how to make sense of what is happening in social media from a wide variety of methodological and analytical perspectives. 

danah boyd
Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

This is a must-read for anyone interested in doing research using social media. It goes way beyond basic arguments about the opportunities of social media for social research and takes the reader through a number of exciting real-world examples that have successfully navigated key methodological challenges to explore new kinds of research questions. After delving into this handbook, you’ll either want try to use social media for your own social research or get your teeth into the new methodological ventures that social media brings to research more generally. This is a necessary resource for anyone involved in contemporary social research issues.

Emma Uprichard
Associate Professor, Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

This outstanding volume brings together a group of forwarding thinking and innovative researchers who lay out the fundamentals of interdisciplinary social research in the contemporary environment. Through showing us how to combine, reinvent, and apply methods, old and new, they produce a must read guide to research for scholars of the future. Engaging, thorough, and fun!

Zizi Papacharissi
Professor of Communication, University of Illinois at Chicago

This handbook will be a key reference for courses on social research, available at a time when the field is becoming increasingly reliant on social media as an object and tool for inquiry. I know of no more timely, comprehensive, and useful compendium of social media research methods.

William H. Dutton
James H. Quello Professor, Michigan State University

"The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a systematic guide to help researchers overcome challenges in conducting projects that deal with the vast data that social media creates, from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings... The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods is the single-most comprehensive resource for any scholar or graduate student embarking on a social media project, with contributions from over 40 international experts from diverse disciplines. Recommended for academic libraries."

T. E. Baker
ARBA

"the first publication to cover the entire research process [of social media research methods]... encourages skill development, showcases tool use, promotes ethical considerations, and demonstrates data-harvesting techniques. Clearly structured for a general audience, any user would find this a comprehensive aid for completing a social media project."

Jennifer Adams
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ISBN: 9781473987975

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