social media research

Qualitative Research Design: Selected Articles from 2014

Research Design Review was first published in November 2009 2014 qualitative research designand currently includes over 110 articles concerning quantitative and qualitative research design issues.  “Qualitative Research Design: Selected Articles from Research Design Review Published in 2014″ is a compilation of 13 articles that were published in 2014 devoted to qualitative research design. To some extent, all of these articles revolve around the idea that adopting quality standards in qualitative research design is critical to the credibility, analyzability, transparency, and usefulness of the outcomes; with the first article making the case that quality issues transcend the paradigm debates.

Because analysis is often deemed the most difficult part of a qualitative study, a number of the articles in this collection pertain to “finding meaning,” data verification, and inference, along with discussions on reflexivity as an important contributor to the analytical process. These articles also touch on newer channels and modes in qualitative research, such as social media and mobile, as well as the evolving stature of qualitative research in areas such as psychology and political science.

The following Table of Contents presents the titles of the 13 articles included in this paper:

1. The Transcendence of Quality Over Paradigms in Qualitative Research

2. Finding Meaning: 4 Reasons Why Qualitative Researchers Miss Meaning

3. Reflections from the Field: Questions to Stimulate Reflexivity Among Qualitative Researchers

4. Verification: Looking Beyond the Data in Qualitative Data Analysis

5. Resisting Stereotypes in Qualitative Research

6. The Elevation of Qualitative Research Design: The Dawning of a New Day

7. Turning Social Media Monitoring into Research: Don’t Be Afraid to Engage

8. If I Conduct a Large Qualitative Study with 100 Participants, is it Quantitative Research? Three Big Reasons Why the Answer is “No!”

9. Integrating Quality Features in Qualitative Mobile Research Design

10. Observational Research Nurtures a Growing Interest in Contexts

11. The Many Faces of Qualitative Research

12. Qualitative Content Analysis: The Challenge of Inference

13. Qualitative Research: Using Empathy to Reveal “More Real” & Less Biased Data

Turning Social Media Monitoring into Research: Don’t Be Afraid to Engage

The idea of conducting qualitative “research” by way of simply listening in on conversations posted on various social media venues is, from a research design perspective, curious. It is curious Conversationbecause the business of understanding how people think (i.e., the business of marketing and social research) has never been about just hearing them talk, reading their words, and/or observing their behavior. While capturing this information may prove interesting and in some circumstances useful (e.g., counting the number of mentions of a competitive brand or variations in reactions to a new product introduction), it is not good enough when the intent is to learn about underlying perceptions and motivations.

This issue is discussed throughout Research Design Review but most notably in a September 2011 post where the distinction is made between social media monitoring and Read Full Text

A Best Practices Approach to Social Media Research

Last month’s post – “Insights vs. Metrics: Finding Meaning in Online Qualitative Research” – talked about “social media metric mania” and the value of off- and online qualitative research tools “that dig behind the obvious and attempt to reveal how people truly think.”  In light of these remarks, it is good to find researchers who are exploring social media research design and attempting to determine the necessary parameters to maximize quality output. The researchers at J.D. Power and Associates are doing just that.  In particular, Gina Pingitore, Chief Research Officer, and others at J.D. Power have written a couple of white papers discussing design issues such as validity, reliability, and best practices in social media research.  The research-on-research work they have conducted on these issues is applauded for its focus on establishing quality standards and for its overarching goal “to create more rigor around the processes that create social insights.”

The February 2012 paper – “The Validity of Social Media Data within the Wireless Industry” – looks at the volume and sentiment of social media content in relationship to results from their “traditional” syndicated survey.  They learned that: there is a direct relationship between the volume of posts in social media and Read Full Text