Liang, H., & Zhu, J. J. H. (2017). Big Data, Collection of (Social Media, Harvesting). In J. Matthes, C. S. Davis, & R. F. Potter (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods (pp. 1–18). https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0015

Zusammenfassung

Social media provide gold mines of data for communication research. Different from traditional social science research methods such as survey, experiment, or content analysis, a new set of methods are required to collect Big Data from social media. In the current entry, we introduce the general procedure of how to collect social media data on content, usage, and structure via direct scraping and application programming interfaces (APIs). We also discuss sampling strategy and ethical issues involved in data collection from social media.

https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0015