Hello Ansgar: Considering the size of social media users (Facebook alone has more than a billion users), it is virtually impossible to get a true representative sample (i.e., everyone is given an equal chance of selection). One way to do is to narrow down your research question and randomly draw your sample from a specific user group in a particular social media site (say Facebook or LinkedIn user groups) or multiple groups in multiple sites (only if you could treat the data separately). This way you may be able to achieve some degree of randomization. Also, controlling for the type of social media site is important, as each social media site has a different privacy policy, nature and amount of personal data stored, and shared. There are other host of issues that could affect the results, such as, user age, gender, awareness, experience, personality, etc. I hope other list members can provide more insights. Thank you, On Sat, Jun 20, 2015 at 5:32 AM, Ansgar Koene <Ansgar.Koene@nottingham.ac.uk
wrote:
[sorry for the re-post, forgot the link to the survey last time]
Hi all, I've recently launched an online survey to ask people which conditions they would like to have met before they would want to consent to having their social media data used for research purposes (see link below). Does anyone have any good suggestions how I can best reach an audience that represent a proper cross-section of the internet using population? Mechanical Turk won't be an option since for the purposes of this survey Turkers would not be a representative population sample. Neither is the student population.
Any ideas?
Thanks, Ansgar
Survey link: https://nottingham.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/conditions-for-consent-to-analyse-soc...
Dr. Ansgar Koene CaSMa - Citizen centric approaches to social media analysis Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute University of Nottingham arkoene <https://sites.google.com/site/arkoene/> http://casma.wp.horizon.ac.uk/ http://www.horizon.ac.uk/ ________________________________________
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