A Date with Data: Using A Facebook App to Collect Network Data

• In Event: Integrating Social Media Data Into Communication Research Using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)

Abstract

In this presentation I will be sharing our experiences with a data collection effort in which we used a Facebook app, Bernie Hogan’s NameGenWeb, to gather Facebook network data from our participants. Although these network data (such as centrality measures for each participant, for instance) were helpful in that they provided a way to capture and measure characteristics of participants’ Facebook Friends networks -- which we were then able to relate to measures of social capital and other self-reported measures -- it also resulted in unanticipated challenges. For instance, we were not able to discern how many individuals refused to “add” the app once they got to Facebook’s privacy information screen – a significant limitation that affected our ability to describe the representativeness of our sample.

In a related study, we asked participants to request that their Facebook Friends do a brief favor for them as a way to measure the social capital embedded in their network; the favor involved filling out a brief survey which was linked to a Facebook app. Although we were only interested in surveys from individuals explicitly invited by our participants, their app activity showed up in the News Feed of others (who then clicked on the app to see what it was) and thus left us with little control over exposure of our data collection context.

These limitations (and others) aside, Facebook apps offer communication scholars an exciting new method for gathering data about participants’ network characteristics and other data which doesn’t rely on self-report. In this presentation, I will describe our use of a Facebook app to collect data from participants and the ways in which this process both compromised and enhanced our research, with a focus on sharing ‘best practices’ for communication researchers interested in using apps and other newer methods for collecting server-level data.

Author

• Nicole Ellison, School of Information