Facebook and other social media sites are gradually emerging as research tools for social scientists, according to Michal Kosinski, an assistant professor of organizational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Writing in the Stanford Business Insights blog, Kosinski says compared to old-style laboratory-based research, Facebook provides a powerful approach to studying people.
“I am quite sure that one day, research based in a digital environment will become more widespread than traditional psychological experiments and studies,” he adds.
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The huge amounts of information available on the some 1.4 billion user profiles of Facebook, could open up new avenues of study into human personality and behaviour on a scale previously possible only with huge grants and tenure.
Kosinski says despite a wide range of social media platforms from Twitter to YouTube, he found Facebook particularly convenient for social science research.
The demographic information and behavioural footprints Facebook profiles contain a wealth of demographic information and behavioural footprints than in other social media.
The information available is also of exceptionally high quality. It is difficult to falsify information since the network of friends could easily challenge it.
The breadth of available data also allows for discovering patterns that would be impossible to detect using traditional approaches. ‘By analyzing Facebook Likes of millions of users, for example, we can reveal subtle patterns that would be difficult to identify using traditional surveys,” he says.
“The results, too, are often spot on. My research, published earlier this year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed that a computer model based on Facebook Likes can predict personality traits better than one’s friends and family members,” Kosinski points out.
The huge size of Facebook members is another advantage in that that even those demographic groups underrepresented on Facebook, such as older or less educated, are still available in very large numbers.
This population can be also accessed at a relatively low cost, especially if one includes viral features that encourage participants to invite their Facebook friends.
In 2007, Kosinski’s colleague David Stillwell, a graduate student at the time, launched a Facebook app called myPersonality, which offered participants access to 25 psychological tests as well as feedback on their scores.
He invited 150 of his Facebook friends at the time. Four years later, we had attracted an astounding 6 million participants. We make the database available to others and, so far, almost 200 researchers from more than 100 academic institutions have used data from it.
However, researchers should be mindful that while Facebook profiles reflect the actual and not self-idealized image, users can control and selectively remove information from their profiles.
The Facebook users behaviour, to some extent, will be affected by the algorithms of the platform. For example, stories that appear on one’s news feed are clearly more likely to be liked.
Thus, while studying Facebook data, researchers have to separate the effects of users’ preferences and behaviours from the effects of Facebook algorithms.
Researchers may also have to deal with ethical issues and also to protect the privacy of users. While individuals have to give their consent to take a researcher’s Facebook-based personality test or to allow access to their profiles, they may not be aware of how much information they are parting with.
Those who share their gender, location or even political leanings, may not realize that a particular photo might reveal something about their health or sexual orientation.
Thus, researchers should provide specific details with prospective participants regarding what they could be sharing upon signing the consent form. The mere availability of data and participants’ willingness to share it does not grant researchers an automatic right to record and use it freely.
The privacy question also extends to the participants’ friends who may appear in comments or photo. Since they have not consented to participating in the research, would it be ethical to use such information?
“I believe that it is acceptable to use such data, as long as it is only used to learn about the participant and not the friend. For example, we should be able to note a friend’s gender to help us determine how many male and female friends the participant has.
“Or, if we see that friends have posted photos related to extreme sports, we might learn more about the participant’s interest in those activities. We’d focus not on the friends themselves, but rather on what they tell us about the participant,” he adds.
Kosinski points out to the need to develop guidelines pertaining to new privacy challenges posed by social media environments. (Image Courtesy : www.flickr.com)