Qualitative Inquiry Using Reddit Data

Background: This study outlines a field-tested method used to analyze data from Reddit, a major social media platform used by six percent of online adults in the U.S.  Reddit is considered one of the largest social news and content aggregation web sites in the world, with 234 million unique users and eight billion monthly page views. Unlike other social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, which feature linear interactive discussions, Reddit’s unique interactive feature of “upvoting” and “downvoting” engagement displays discussions hierarchically, where more popular posts essentially rise to the top, or “front” of the page.  Our project provides a step-by-step account of a Reddit-based qualitative thematic analysis from a social work heuristic lens on the subject of poverty.

Methods: The research team downloaded all responses (N1=21,501) to the post, “What do insanely poor people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?” a question that was posed by a Reddit user unrelated to this study. We reviewed each comment, and retained only those that were relevant to our guiding research question on poverty. A final dataset of N2=1,495 comments with a total word count of N3 = 105,767 was created.  We conducted an inductive and deductive qualitative thematic analysis of the data.

Results: We outline a nine-step plan for qualitative social work researchers to use Reddit posts as qualitative data, which covers the following practical considerations: identifying a core question, finding data, human subjects approval, epistemology, data collection, data analysis, and project planning.  Although a considerable amount of research has been conducted examining the way social media influences people, our study fell into a unique category of Reddit research that uses the actual content of posts as the data examined through qualitative research methodology.

Implications: To our knowledge, no such account of mining social media big data from Reddit for social work practice exists in the literature.  Social workers and social work researchers were once relegated to in-person interviews, focus groups, case studies, and observation; we can now observe what is stated by thousands and even millions of people on social media about the most mundane, important, or secretive parts of their lives. Social media posts are of value to qualitative social work researchers who may wish to use technology to better understand social phenomena, especially the intimate accounts of daily lives, lived experiences, personal insights and opinions.