[Air-l] Blogs as source of socio-demographic data

[Ellie Wix]

I can only speak as a user, but I would be extremely cautious about the
relationships status area.  People often  list fictitous relationships that
are in-jokes between friends.  About half the time 'in a relationship' is
correct, but of the 5 people who I am friended with and are listed as
married, only 1 actually is.  Also, now that it doesn't restrict for school
emails, people can make fake accounts, or accounts for pets.  As an example,
I made a facebook account for my iguana who has a hometown of "In the corner
next to the snakes, IL" and is listed as married to my roommate.

As for location, hometown, political, and religion, I can't really say much
other than it is not uncommon to see people put in joking answers.

On 5/30/07, Alexander Semenov <semenoffalex at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello everyone,
> recently I was surfing Russian facebook-clone vkontakte.ru and decided to
> count statistics of political preferences. I don't consider my results to
> be valid, so I've decided to ask about any thoughts, articles etc. on the
> validity of blogs as a source of socio-demographic data (age, gender,
> location, political and religious preferences etc.). While I think that
> other interests such as music, reading, films etc. are quite reliable I
> can't say the same about socio-demographic data. What do you think?
> Thanks in advance.
> Best wishes,
> Alexander Semenov.
> MA student
> Faculty of Sociology
> Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences (MSSES)
> http://www.msses.ru/English/index.html
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