I am working on a research related to the cooperative based microfinance. I have collected some opinions on a question posted on a specialized online group of microfinance professionals and researchers. I have a few queries regarding the responses collected through this medium.
Is there a special name for opinions collected on a research topic over some online platform (say LinkedIn group)?
Is this method alright or has some inherent weaknesses? Are their ways to overcome?
Can we apply the same qualitative analysis tools to the responses or some specific techniques exist to analyze the responses collected on social media/blogs?
Najmul:
Here's a study on Social Media that can give an example of how to analyse your data.
Best regards,
Debra
Conference Paper Using Social Media for Educational Purposes: Approaches and ...
Another issue I often think of is the validity and rigour of the research.
I think there's something crudely pragmatic here, though it relates back to what Jesse has already said. Bottom line is that better quality journals do not accept material based from online data-gathering. Likewise, better Universities won't accept such materials for their Postgraduate degrees, and, who knows, maybe in some cases for undergraduate ones too. I certainly would not accept material based from online survey at any level. I particularly despise those theses I see that openly state that they failed to gather sufficient data "face to face", so resorted to online as a default, thereby rather confirming the status and insufficiencies of online.
Many business companies in internet marketing collect and analyze comments, posts, entries, etc. from social media portals.
It is also done by some financial institutions, banks acquiring additional information about potential borrowers and insurance companies against possible conclusion of insurance contract. Commercially operating companies and financial institutions operate in this area on the border of the law on the protection of personal data.
Until this type of acquisition of information about potential customers is legally regulated, then commercially operating companies and financial institutions will conduct such activity. In addition, the issue of the security of this type of data about users of social media portals is of particular importance, as there have been effective cybercriminal attacks that resulted in the theft of personal data of users of social media portals.
I invite you to the discussion
Interesting area Dariusz. I think it necessary to separate the ideas of investigating specific individuals, maybe around specific issues, and text-mining for data more generally.
On harvesting specifics, at a personal level, I regard this as due diligence around who I do business with. And, yes, I have declined to conclude a contract with someone as a result of what I found on Facebook. People are off-guard, truths come out, but yes, of course, Companies House (now online for free) is more usual and also telling.
As to more general text-mining, I have played with that too. I have never understood why text mining is massively used commercially, for instance in marketing, is somewhat used in academic applied sciences, but not adopted in social sciences. Anyway, I was researching on commercial cooking courses for tourists, gathering data at many schools. For one school I text-mined its Tripadvisor reviews. The results confirmed my more usual phenomenological work at that school, and, indeed, both sets of results confirmed the trends emergent from my work with all involved schools in various areas of Thailand. Text-mining assuredly doesn't have to be about Big Data, which may be the view of social sciences, if there's a view at all.
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