Social Media As a Tool for Scholarship

One of the 12 Grand Challenges for Social Work, Harness Technology For Social Good, invites us to consider ways that technology can be used to achieve equal opportunity, equity and justice. Social media, through platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, has been used by marginalized and oppressed groups to amplify voices and perspectives. Hashtags (#) are the new protest signs. For example, within moments of Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson, the hashtag #Ferguson showed up on Twitter. #Ferguson served as a protest sign, and identifier, and and rallying cry for communities around the country. Social work scholar Desmond Patton has looked at the intersection between Twitter posts and gang involvement. Social media has emerged as a platform for addressing inequality and inequity, as well as scholarship with marginalize and silenced communities. However, social media also poses risk for exacerbating inequities and vulnerabilities. Social media has been used to troll people (i.e. harass) based on ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation.

This roundtable discussion will begin with a dialogue about four practices in which social media interfaces with research:

(1) as a tool for dissemination, such as through turning articles in to infographics to increase research-to-practice dissemination, using tools such as Piktochart and Twitter;

(2) participant recruitment, especially in reaching high-stigma participants such as people with HIV or people undergoing gender reassignment therapies on spaces such as Facebook;

(3) social work interventions, such as health interventions carried out in Facebook groups or over Skype video;

(4) as a data source, such as downloading hashtag data from Twitter, or photo information from Facebook, and using tools like NVIVO to manage social media data. we will share information about social media data projects that are attempting to collect data for analysis, such as the OurDataHelps project which collects social media data to further research about suicide.

Participants will share examples about how they have used social media as part of their scholarship and research, including specific examples about how social media can promote equal opportunity, equity, and justice in research, and how these four practices have been used in research across the grand challenges. We will outline opportunities and risks related to research use of social media, and share protocols that have been developed to protect vulnerable populations when undertaking social media research. We will also offer recommendations about specific technologies that support each of these areas, such as those mentioned above. The goal of this roundtable is to stimulate discussion in this emerging area of social scholarship, increase awareness about emerging tools for research and scholarship with social media, and promote responsibility of the social work profession to exert presence in discussions about best practices for using social media in research.