Session: Bringing Social Media into Social Work Research: Demystifying Methods for Harnessing Big Social Data (Society for Social Work and Research 22nd Annual Conference - Achieving Equal Opportunity, Equity, and Justice)

Social media replicates daily life in the 21st century. Web 2.0 has brought with it a proliferation in user-generated content exemplified by online social networking sites, such as Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. Far from a mere networking tool, social media is increasingly used as a new public commons. Social media platforms have given voice to political protests, personal narratives of survival, and even a space to cope with and engage in gang violence.

Many social science disciplines have embraced the ‘Big Data Revolution' and developed computational methods of inquiry to accurately and effectively harness the volume, variety, veracity and velocity of social media data. Importantly, the use of social media data in social science has meant scholars have had to become inured to methods previously foreign to social inquiry: machine learning, data mining, and sentiment analysis are just a few examples.

Although wide-spread in many other social science fields, social work has yet to dive into the ‘data deluge'. Indeed, “Harnessing Big Data for Social Good” has been identified as one of the 12 Grand Challenges of Social Work. Part of the hesitancy is an unfamiliarity with the methods needed to analyze large-scale unstructured data.

This symposium brings together four papers that use social media data in a social work specific research context. The symposium aims to: 1. Demonstrate the use of social media in addressing social work research questions 2. Introduce computational methods for analyzing large-scale, unstructured social media data

Social media data offers social work scholars an unprecedented opportunity to scale up the scope and implications of our research, if we can begin to understand the methods most effective in making sense of the data. This symposium offers to be a first step in that direction.