Am a student pursuing Masters in disaster management and i want to know details regarding how effctivel social media data can be used in context of disasters..
Thanks
Hareesh
Hi Hareesh,
Thank you for your question. While my project looks at social media in DDR, the majority of my data collection has involved interviews and participant observations of groups using social media, rather than explicitly using social media data.
You raise a very good question which I am also looking into. Typically, when considering the validity of social media data I use my interviews to the verify what was being communicated within a specific post or exchange, and what was the broader context in which this post occurred in. As I am looking to understand how social media interacts with communities and emergency services experiences of natural hazards and DDR, it is the participants' experiences which are used to interpret and validate the social media data that I am studying.
I hope this answers your question.
Cheers
Katelyn
Hello, I think that it requires qualitative research to sanwer such questions. People exposed to natural hazards are th ebest to report in how far social media was useful in their individual cases. In Fiji where we asked such questions with regards to urban flooding relevance was rather wide-spread and at times very different than initially expected. So people's experiences provide a crucial starting point and from here one could systematically categorize potential benefits of social media in disaster issues.
Hope this helps. Maybe also look at the importance of SMS / mobile phones to communicate during disaster events. This might be even more important than social media as in the Fiji context many did not have easy access to social media, but almost all had mobile phones and used them to gather and spread information.
Thanks for the answers Katelyn Rossiter and Eberhard Weber. This has given me a new angle to look at.
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