Social Statistics Seminar Series: Seminar 3 - Frorian Keusch on "Comparing three ways of collecting data about Facebook use: Self-reports, online meters, and data donation"
| Dates: | 17 January 2023 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Current University students |
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| Speaker: | Florian Keusch |
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Abstract: Historically, data about media consumption used to be collected via self-reports in surveys. These self-reports are known to suffer from errors due to forgetting and social desirability, among others. With the advent of online media in general and social media platforms in particular, researchers can now directly observe digital traces of users' online behavior at a much finer-grained level and over longer periods of time. However, for researchers to get full access to these data, users must install a meter to all their online-enabled devices to passively track the full range of online behavior. A third, and most recent option is data donation where the users download their own data from a (social) media platform and then share them with the researcher. For the user, this approach has the advantage of high control over what data are actually shared with the researcher. On the downside, down- and uploading the data can be rather cumbersome for users. In this talk, I will compare the strength and weaknesses of these three approaches when collecting data about Facebook use. I will discuss practical issues of getting access to the data and present a study of German Facebook users that allows us to compare the quality of the data generated through the three approaches.
Speaker
Florian Keusch
Role: Professor of Social Data Science and Methodology
Organisation: University of Mannheim (Department of Sociology)
Biography: Bio: Florian Keusch is Professor of Social Data Science and Methodology in the Department of Sociology at the University of Mannheim, Germany and Adjunct Research Professor in the Joint Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) at the University of Maryland, US. In his research, he develops, implements, and assesses modern methods of collecting data for the behavioral and social sciences. In particular, he is interested in how to jointly collect self-reports (usually via (mobile) web surveys) and passive measurement from smartphone and wearable sensors, online and device log files, Internet search queries, and other digital traces to better study research questions on migration, employment, and inequality.
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