Facebook as a research tool for the social sciences: Opportunities, challenges, ethical considerations, and practical guidelines.

By Michal Kosinski, Sandra C. Matz, Samuel D. Gosling, V. Popov, David J. Stillwell. American Psychologist, 2015

894 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Facebook is rapidly gaining recognition as a powerful research tool for the social sciences. It constitutes a large and diverse pool of participants, who can be selectively recruited for both online and offline studies. Additionally, it facilitates data collection by storing detailed records of its users' demographic profiles, social interactions, and behaviors. With participants' consent, these data can be recorded retrospectively in a convenient, accurate, and inexpensive way. Based on our experience in designing, implementing, and maintaining multiple Facebook-based psychological studies that attracted over 10 million participants, we demonstrate how to recruit participants using Facebook, incentivize them effectively, and maximize their engagement. We also outline the most important opportunities and challenges associated with using Facebook for research, provide several practical guidelines on how to successfully implement studies on Facebook, and finally, discuss ethical considerations.

Subfields: Health, Sociology and Political Science, Statistical and Nonlinear Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/20b6bc2fe44535e13f7c0786151df85481614c89

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Citations in the corpus

An Evaluation of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Its Rapid Rise, and Its Effective Use (2018, methodology): “…social sciences that extends beyond MTurk and its ilk to new methods such as mobile sensing (Harari et al., 2017), scraping data from social media (Kosinski, Matz, Gosling, Popov, & Stillwell, 2015), and global recruitment reach using sites such as Google AdWords (e.g., Antoun, Zhang, Conrad, &…”
The Impact of COVID-19 Epidemic Declaration on Psychological Consequences: A Study on Active Weibo Users (2020, background): “Privacy was strictly protected during the procedure, referring to the ethical principles [19].”
AMIGOS: A Dataset for Affect, Personality and Mood Research on Individuals and Groups (2017, background): “Databases for personality research have considered information related to linguistics in written text [11], social networks activity [12], and behavior in group activities [13].”
The Ethics of AI Ethics: An Evaluation of Guidelines (2019, background): “6 personal traits that are actually secret or private via machine learning applications (Kosinski and Wang 2018; Kosinski, Stillwell, and Graepel 2013; Kosinski et al. 2015).”
Psychological targeting as an effective approach to digital mass persuasion (2017, methodology): “The myPersonality dataset was collected via the myPersonality Facebook app between 2007 and 2012 (20).”
The Song Is You (2016, methodology): “Nine thousand four hundred and seventy-eight Facebook users volunteered through the myPersonality Facebook application (Kosinski, Matz, Gosling, Popov, & Stillwell, 2015) in exchange for feedback about their preference scores.”
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Computational Linguistics in Suicide Prevention (2021, methodology): “(2015). Facebook as a research tool for the social sci-”