Zusammenfassung

There is a lot of debate amongst academics and researchers about the opportunities and challenges of online and social media research. Social media websites offer rich, naturally-occurring data and researchers are using such websites to support their work, such as scraping data from online discussions, mining data from archives, recruiting participants, and interviewing online. Like all research, online and social media research is wrought with ethical dilemmas. Often what are missing from the conversation are the views of users. How do they curate their digital lives? What do they understand about how their information is used and shared on the internet? What do users think about their information being used by researchers and in online and social media research? This report presents the findings of exploratory qualitative research conducted by NatCen Social Research to provide detailed insight into how social media users feel about their posts being used in research and their understanding of this type of research. These views reveal lessons that researchers and practitioners could apply in their research design, recruitment, collecting or generating of data, and reporting of results. We offer recommendations about how to approach ethical issues in social media research; drawing on the views of the very people we seek to research- the users. The research used two qualitative data collection methods: - Four focus groups - Two paired and two depth interviews We draw out the key messages next, followed by a summary of recommendations for practitioners and researchers working in the field of online and social media research.