[Air-L] to add participants to your SNSs or not?

[Jordan Kraemer]

Dear Roser,

I wanted to reply to your message from a couple of weeks ago about whether to add research participants to one's existing social network profiles or not. This issue definitely came up in my ethnographic research on Facebook among users in Berlin, and I recently published an article you might find helpful ("Friend or Freund: Social Media and Transnational Connections in Berlin, http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07370024.2013.823821), though I'm not sure how much I discuss the issue directly. I am addressing it further in a book chapter I'm working on, and could share with you a recent conference paper based on the same material.

I found it made more sense to use my existing Facebook and Twitter profiles, and to create a separate group for research participants, as you mention, though in some cases, I had to create new profiles because my participants were on sites I hadn't used before. But I know other researchers have found the opposite worked better, and created separate profiles. I think it depends a lot on the specifics of the project and your relationship to your research participants. For example, how will it look if the researcher isn't already embedded in existing networks of connections? How easily or quickly will it be to join the participants' networks? Some people might find it odd or suspicious to add someone who has no or few contacts, but on the other hand, it helps clearly demarcate the researcher as a researcher. Another consideration if you do create separate profiles is how will you manage your personal accounts -- will you just stay logged in to your research accounts, or will you switch back and forth?

best,
Jordan

----------------------------
Jordan Kraemer
Social Science Research Network Junior Fellow
Anthropology, UC Irvine
www.jordankraemer.com





On Feb 3, 2014, at 7:43 AM, Roser Beneito Montagut <rbeneito at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello everybody,
> 
> We have just started an ethnography (online and offline) to study the
> extent to which the social web can mitigate isolation and loneliness
> feelings among the elderly by promoting their interpersonal relationships
> online.
> 
> I appreciate if you can point me to articles discussing whether the
> researcher has added the participants to his/her social network site (e.g.
> Facebook) or has created an specific profile for the research. We have
> decided to add the participants to our SNSs, creating a group for them, but
> I would like to know what other researchers have done and the challenges of
> this methodological decision they have faced.
> 
> Apologies beforehand if this topic has already been discussed in the list.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Roser
> 
> Roser Beneito-Montagut
> Senior Lecturer
> School of Computing, Multimedia and Telecommunication
> Open University of Catalonia
> Barcelona
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