The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods

The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a step-by-step guide to overcoming the challenges inherent in research projects that deal with ‘big and broad data’, from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings. The handbook includes chapters on specific social media platforms such as Twitter, Sina Weibo and Instagram, as well as a series of critical chapters. The holistic approach is organised into the following sections: Conceptualising & Designing Social Media Research Collection & Storage Qualitative Approaches to Social Media Data Quantitative Approaches to Social Media Data Diverse Approaches to Social Media Data Analytical Tools Social Media Platforms This handbook is the single most comprehensive resource for any scholar or graduate student embarking on a social media project. 

Table of Contents:
01 Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods: Goals, Challenges and Innovations - Anabel Quan-Haase and Luke Sloan SECTION ONE: CONCEPTUALISING & DESIGNING SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH 02 What is social media and what questions can social media research help us answer? - Lori McCay-Peet and Anabel Quan-Haase 03 Big Data - Hype or Revolution? - Rob Kitchin 04 Building interdisciplinary social media research teams: Motivations, challenges, and policy frameworks - Anabel Quan-Haase and Lori McCay-Peet 05 Social media users’ views on the ethics of social media research - Kelsey Beninger 06 The Role of Online Reputation Management, Trolling, and Personality Traits in the Crafting of the Virtual Self on Social Media - Shuzhe Yang, Anabel Quan-Haase, Andrew Nevin and Yimin Chen 07 Social Science ‘lite’? Deriving Demographic Proxies from Twitter - Luke Soan SECTION TWO: COLLECTION & STORAGE 08 Think before you collect: Setting up a data collection approach for social media studies - Philipp Mayr & Katrin Weller 09 The Social Media Data Processing Pipeline - David M. Brown, Adriana Soto-Corominas, Juan Luis Suárez & Javier de la Rosa 10 The Role of APIs in Data Sampling from Social Media - Dietmar Janetzko 11 Data Storage, Curation and Preservation - Alex Voss, Ilia Lvov and Sara Day Thomson 12 Using Social Media in Data Collection: Designing Studies with the Qualitative E-Research Framework - Janet Salmons SECTION THREE: QUALITATIVE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA 13 Small Data, Thick Data: Thickening Strategies for Trace-Based Social Media Research - Guillaume Latzko-Toth, Claudine Bonneau & Mélanie Millette 14 Visuality in Social Media: researching images, circulations and practices - Martin Hand 15 Coding of non-text data - Diane Rasmussen Pennington 16 Twitter as method: Using Twitter as a tool to conduct research - Bonnie Stewart 17 Small stories research: a narrative paradigm for the analysis of social media - Alexandra Georgakopoulou SECTION FOUR: QUANTITATIVE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA 18 Geospatial Analysis - Olga Buchel & Diane Rasmussen Pennington 19 Pragmatics of Network Centrality - Shadi Ghajar-Khosravi and Mark Chignell 20 Predictive Analytics with Social Media Data - Niels Buus Lassen Lisbeth La Cour and Ravi Vatrapu 21 Deception Detection and Rumor Debunking for Social Media - Victoria L. Rubin SECTION FIVE: DIVERSE APPROACHES TO SOCIAL MEDIA DATA 22 From Site-specificity to Hyper-locality: Performances of Place in Social Media - Nadav Hochman 23 Analysing social media data and other data sources: A methodological overview - Frauke Zeller 24 Listening to social rhythms: Exploring logged interactional data through sonification - Jack Jamieson and Jeffrey Boase 25 Innovative social location-aware services for mobile phones - Bernhard Klein & Ulf-Dietrich Reips SECTION SIX: RESEARCH & ANALYTICAL TOOLS 26 COSMOS: The Collaborative On-Line Social Media Observatory - Jeffrey Morgan 27 Social Lab: An “Open Source Facebook” - Ulf-Dietrich Reips and Pablo Garaizar 28 R for Social Media Analysis - Simon Hegelich 29 GATE: An Open-Source NLP Toolkit for Mining Social Media - Kalina Bontcheva 30 A how-to for using Netlytic to collect and analyze social media data: A case study of the use of Twitter during the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine - Anatoliy Gruzd , Philip Mai and Andrea Kampen 31 Theme Detection in Social Media - Daniel Angus 32 Sentiment Analysis - Mike Thelwall SECTION SEVEN: SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS 33 The ontology of tweets: Mixed methods approaches to the study of Twitter - Dhiraj Murthy 34 Instagram - Linnea Laestadius 35 Weibo - Xiao Hu, Chen Qiao & King-wa Fu 36 Foursquare - Matthew J. Williams and Martin Chorley 37 Facebook - Jessica Vitak 38 Big Data and Political Science: The Case of VKontakte and the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution in Ukraine - Anatoliy Gruzd and Ben O’Bright 39 A Retrospective on State of the Art Social Media Research Methods: Ethical decisions, big-small data rivalries and the spectre of the 6Vs - Luke Sloan and Anabel Quan-Haase

About the Author :
Luke Sloan is Professor and Deputy Director of the Social Data Science Lab and reader at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University. His research focuses on understanding what social media can tell us about the social world, with a particular emphasis on data linkage and ethics. Dr. Anabel Quan-Haase (Ph.D., University of Toronto) is a Full Professor of Sociology and Information and Media Studies at Western University and the Rogers Chair in Studies in Journalism and Information Technology. She is the author of Technology and Society (Oxford University Press, 2020), co-author of Real-Life Sociology (Oxford University Press, 2021), co-editor of the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (Sage, 2022), and co-editor of the Handbook of Computational Social Science (Routledge, 2022). Dr. Quan-Haase has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings. She is past chair of the Communication, Information Technology, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association and past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science. Through her policy work she has cooperated with the Benton Foundation, Partnership for Progress on the Digital Divide, Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and Canada’s Digital Policy Forum.  

Review :
Wow! I'm keeping it right next to my desk. It's the first methods book for the 21st century. I love the way it gives a wide range of specific cases which have broad general implications for doing my - and your - research. Understanding social media is key to understanding contemporary public life. What you have in this fabulously curated book is a collection of important insights on how to make sense of what is happening in social media from a wide variety of methodological and analytical perspectives.  This is a must-read for anyone interested in doing research using social media. It goes way beyond basic arguments about the opportunities of social media for social research and takes the reader through a number of exciting real-world examples that have successfully navigated key methodological challenges to explore new kinds of research questions. After delving into this handbook, you’ll either want try to use social media for your own social research or get your teeth into the new methodological ventures that social media brings to research more generally. This is a necessary resource for anyone involved in contemporary social research issues. This outstanding volume brings together a group of forwarding thinking and innovative researchers who lay out the fundamentals of interdisciplinary social research in the contemporary environment. Through showing us how to combine, reinvent, and apply methods, old and new, they produce a must read guide to research for scholars of the future. Engaging, thorough, and fun! This handbook will be a key reference for courses on social research, available at a time when the field is becoming increasingly reliant on social media as an object and tool for inquiry. I know of no more timely, comprehensive, and useful compendium of social media research methods. "The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods offers a systematic guide to help researchers overcome challenges in conducting projects that deal with the vast data that social media creates, from the formulation of research questions through to the interpretation of findings... The SAGE Handbook of Social Media Research Methods is the single-most comprehensive resource for any scholar or graduate student embarking on a social media project, with contributions from over 40 international experts from diverse disciplines. Recommended for academic libraries." "the first publication to cover the entire research process [of social media research methods]... encourages skill development, showcases tool use, promotes ethical considerations, and demonstrates data-harvesting techniques. Clearly structured for a general audience, any user would find this a comprehensive aid for completing a social media project."