gradPSYCH - November 2011 - (Page 32)

CAREER CENTER Using social media in your research Experts explore the practicalities of observing human behavior through Facebook and Twitter. BY MELISSA LEE PHILLIPS P sychology researchers often draw study participants from one relatively homogeneous group: undergraduates. That’s too bad, because Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media have made a rainbow of research participants just as convenient as Psych 101 students, says Sam Gosling, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin. “We no longer have the excuse of relying on self-reports of undergraduates,” Gosling says. “We can now reach out to other groups and see the actual electronic traces of their behavior.” His group studies how people express their personalities in their physical or virtual environments. They’ve found, for example, that people tend to express their real personalities on Facebook, rather than idealized versions of themselves, according to a 2008 study published in Psychological Science. But along with the possible benefits, research using social media also comes with some issues to consider: • Privacy and confidentiality. Institutional review boards often balk at studies that seek to analyze people’s behavior on social media websites because it’s ethically unclear whether Facebook, Twitter or other types of postings count as public or private behavior, and therefore require their authors’ consent to be used in research. “Technically, the information that you post on Facebook is publicly available,” says Emily Christofides, a social psychology PhD candidate at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. But many people think of posts as private, and institutional review boards tend to back them up, she says. To avoid this problem, many psychologists obtain explicit permission from social media members they’d like to use in their studies. Even with participants’ permission, however, you can still run into trouble if you gather data from their friends and networks — people who have not given permission to be studied, says Nicole Ellison, PhD, a Michigan State University associate professor of telecommunication, information studies and media. A commonly overlooked privacy problem is researchers’ use of their own accounts — and associated friends’ — to collect data that participants believe is limited to their “friends” network, she says. Ellison says that researchers can avoid this problem by only examining publicly available profiles that have no connections to their own. The safest way to make sure you’re not unintentionally accessing privileged information is to use an account that has no friends or other connections, she says. 32 • gradPSYCH • November 2011 

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of gradPSYCH - November 2011

GradPSYCH - November 2011
Contents
Most practice-oriented psychology students Google their clients
Does romance quash women’s interest in science?
Goodbye to the ad hoc postdoc
Graduate students take on Capitol Hill
Media Picks
Odd Jobs
Research Roundup
Grad school traps
Chair’s Corner
Postgrad growth area: Designing workplace wellness programs
Study smart
Fighting food addiction
Matters to a Degree
Using social media in your research
Midlife grad students
Are you really ready for private practice?
Bulletin Board
Jobs, internships, postdocs and other opportunities
The Back Page

gradPSYCH - November 2011

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