Grant Blank

The SAGE handbook of online research methods

The chapter will provide: an overview of geographical referencing and the importance of geographically referenced data; examples of geographical data linkage and mapping, including some case studies; and a discussion of the creation of geographical datasets and of how work with online geographical data relates to other elements of the geographical information industry. We explain how geographical information systems (GIS) are relevant, and guide readers who wish to find out more about GIS per se to relevant sources that provide an introduction to GIS. Our discussion of the emergence of online tools for geographical data is subdivided into: Data sources (e.g. NeSS, US Factfinder); Geographical linkage (directories, lookups, e.g. GeoConvert); Mapping (both online, using virtual globes and mapping sites, and offline using data from the internet); and more specialist spatial analysis tools. In further guidance for those seeking to apply these tools we highlight the resources provided by Geo-Refer.

Next Generation Users: The Internet in Britain

This report focuses on the emergence of “next generation users” in Britain, Internet users who are developing a new pattern of Internet access. We follow the emerging next generation users throughout the next eight sections that summarise the details and highlights of the 2011 Oxford Internet Survey. The report closes with a methodological appendix. The first detailed section of the report focuses on describing the diffusion of the Internet as an innovation in information and communication technology (ICT). The second section focuses on the characteristics and attitudes of Internet users. The third part describes how people with different backgrounds use the Internet, followed by a fourth part which looks specifically at the use of the Internet in politics and government. The fifth section turns to the question of how the Internet is reshaping friendships and social networks. The sixth section looks at the social implications of Internet use. The seventh section examines beliefs and attitudes of individuals about the control and regulation of the Internet. The final section examines the key issue of exclusion, either by social and economic divides or by personal choice, describing non-users and former users. Each section opens with an overview of the trends described in the section.

WHO CREATES CONTENT

Until the Internet arrived, content creation and distribution was always an expensive, difficult process. With the Internet it is dramatically easier, faster, and cheaper. Some argue that this will move creation out of the hands of elites and lead to wider participation in the public sphere and to enhanced democracy. This paper makes three contributions to this debate. First, it uses a national random sample of the British population. This is much broader than most prior work. Second, it creates the first evidence-based typology of Internet content creation, identifying three types named ‘skilled content’, ‘social and entertainment content’, and ‘political content’. The implicit assumption of many researchers that only one type of content exists is not accurate. Third, using multivariate logistic regression it shows the characteristics of different populations that produce each type of content. Elites have no impact on creation of skilled content. Social and entertainment content is more likely to be created by non-elites. Only creation of political content is significantly and positively associated with elite status. These results clarify inconsistencies in prior studies. Each type of content is produced by a different kind of creator. Thus, type is more than just content; it also describes differences in who creates the content. The varying relationships between elite status and content creation suggest that it is important for future research to pay close attention to the type of content under study when considering possible democratization of creation.

Dimensions of Internet use: amount, variety, and types

We examine the dimensions of Internet use based on a representative sample of the population of the UK, making three important contributions. First, we clarify theoretical dimensions of Internet use that have been conflated in prior work. We argue that the property space of Internet use has three main dimensions: amount of use, variety of different uses, and types of use. Second, the Oxford Internet Survey 2011 data set contains a comprehensive set of 48 activities ranging from email to online banking to gambling. Using the principal components analysis, we identify 10 distinctive types of Internet activities. This is the first typology of Internet uses to be based on such a comprehensive set of activities. We use regression analyses to validate the three dimensions and to identify the characteristics of the users of each type. Each type has a distinctive and different kind of user. The Internet is an extremely diverse medium. We cannot discuss ‘Internet use’ as a general phenomenon; instead, researchers must specify what kind of use they examine.

Age and Trust in the Internet: The Centrality of Experience and Attitudes Toward Technology in Britain

The authors describe changes in user’s trust on the Internet in Britain between 2003 and 2009, and show how the relationship between age and trust can be explained by a combination of experience with the Internet and general attitudes toward technology. The comparison uses 2003 results reported by Dutton and Shepherd (2006) versus similarly sampled 2009 data. The authors examine two sets of dependent variables—perceptions of trust and risk on the Internet and use of the Internet for e-commerce, an anticipated impact of trust. The authors find that indicators of trust are related to experience with the technology, although this relationship is less important in 2009 than it was in 2003. The authors also find that trust is influenced by general attitudes toward technology. When both experience on the Internet and technology attitudes are controlled, the relation between indicators of trust and age disappears. This finding is particularly interesting since age is usually an important predictor of many aspects of the Internet; it suggests that the role of age can be mitigated by addressing the degree to which older individuals tend to have less experience with the Internet and more scepticism about the role of technology in society. Interventions could address both of these determinants of distrust.

Teaching qualitative data analysis to graduate students

This article reports the author’s experience teaching sociology graduate students howto analyze qualitative data. The course focused on teaching practical skills of defining coding categories, coding text, analyzing coded text, and writing up the results of analysis. The assignments used Qualrus software to give students hands-on practice doing all of these. The course was enthusiastically received and will become a permanent part of the sociology methods course offerings at American University.

The Digital Divide Among Twitter Users and Its Implications for Social Research

Hundreds of papers have been published using Twitter data, but few previous papers report the digital divide among Twitter users. British Twitter users are younger, wealthier, and better educated than other Internet users, who in turn are younger, wealthier, and better educated than the off-line British population. American Twitter users are also younger and wealthier than the rest of the population, but they are not better educated. Twitter users are disproportionately members of elites in both countries. Twitter users also differ from other groups in their online activities and their attitudes. These biases and differences have important implications for research based on Twitter data. The unrepresentative characteristics of Twitter users suggest that Twitter data are not suitable for research where representativeness is important, such as forecasting elections or gaining insight into attitudes, sentiments, or activities of large populations. In general, Twitter data seem to be more suitable for corporate use than for social science research.

Representativeness of Social Media in Great Britain: Investigating Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, and Instagram:

Sociological studies show that Internet access, skills, uses, and outcomes vary between different population segments. However, we lack differentiated statistical evidence of the social characteristics of users of distinct social media platforms. We address this issue using a representative survey of Great Britain and investigate the social characteristics of six major social media platforms. We find that age and socioeconomic status are driving forces of several—but not all—of these platforms. The findings suggest that no social media platform is representative of the general population. The unrepresentativeness has major implications for research that uses social media as a data source. Social media data cannot be used to generalize to any population other than themselves.

The echo chamber is overstated: the moderating effect of political interest and diverse media

ABSTRACT In a high-choice media environment, there are fears that individuals will select media and content that reinforce their existing beliefs and lead to segregation based on interest and/or partisanship. This could lead to partisan echo chambers among those who are politically interested and could contribute to a growing gap in knowledge between those who are politically interested and those who are not. However, the high-choice environment also allows individuals, including those who are politically interested, to consume a wide variety of media, which could lead them to more diverse content and perspectives. This study examines the relationship between political interest as well as media diversity and being caught in an echo chamber (measured by five different variables). Using a nationally representative survey of adult internet users in the United Kingdom (N = 2000), we find that those who are interested in politics and those with diverse media diets tend to avoid echo chambers. This work challenges the impact of echo chambers and tempers fears of partisan segregation since only a small segment of the population are likely to find themselves in an echo chamber. We argue that single media studies and studies which use narrow definitions and measurements of being in an echo chamber are flawed because they do not test the theory in the realistic context of a multiple media environment.

Social Media in the Changing Ecology of News Production and Consumption: The Case in Britain

This paper looks at how the production and consumption of news is changing in the UK. It draws from survey research of individuals in Britain from 2003-2011, which includes evidence on patterns of news readership among Internet users and non-users, as well as more qualitative case studies of developments in online news organizations, based on interviews and log files of journalistic sites. Survey evidence has shown a step-jump in the use of online news since 2003, as a complement to print news reading, but a leveling off since 2009. However, this relative stability in news consumption masks a change in the growing role of social networks, both as a substitute for search in many cases, but also in their relationship with online newspapers, as the interaction of mainstream news and networked individuals has begun to reshape the ecology of production and consumption. Institutionally the paper argues that these patterns underscore recent changes in news media, such as their continued reliance on the Internet, but also added competition from social media, which are becoming a major portal to the Internet. Individually we see the empowerment of networked individuals of a Fifth Estate who have achieved a growing independence from the Fourth Estate as more information moves online and individuals become routinely linked to the Internet. However, a growing synergy between the Fourth and Fifth Estate might be one of the more important aspects of the new news ecology.