Trace Interviews Step-By-Step
In this penultimate post for The Person in the (Big) Data edition of EM, Elizabeth Dubois @lizdubois provides
a step-by-step account of how the trace interviewing process works. Trace interviewing is a method used to elicit a person’s stories about why they made particular traces on social media platforms and is a wonderful way of getting at the stories underlying the data. Elizabeth’s step-by-step will hopefully help others wanting to use a similar method in the interview process!
Social media data and other digital traces we leave as we navigate the web offer incredible opportunity for discovery within the social sciences. I am going to take you step by step through the process of trace interviewing – an approach that helps researchers gain richly detailed insights about the social context of that digital data. For those interested in the why as well as the how, Heather Ford and I talk a lot about why we think the method is important and what types of things it can offer researchers (such as validity checks, information about social context, opportunities to join data sets from various platforms) in our paper.
The Study
I want to figure out how people who influence other people on political issues choose their channels of communication (and the impact of those choices). The only way to understand these decisions and their impacts, I think, is a mixed-methods approach. So, I draw on Twitter data for content and network analysis, an online survey and in-depth trace interviews. You can read more about the full work here.
Trace Interviews
Hey, so great to finally meet you in person. Welcome!
By the time I got to the interview stage my interviewee and I already knew quite a lot about each other. They had filled out a survey, they knew I found them because the use the #CDNpoli hashtag, and they had read a project description and signed a consent form in advance.
It was important to form a relationship with my participants well in advance because I needed permission to collect their data. Sometimes trace data is publicly available (for example, tweets made or the list of accounts a Twitter user follows). But, even when it is publicly available, I tend to think that giving your participant a heads up that you’ve got or will collect data specifically about them is a good call. The fact is, people don’t always understand what making a public tweet means.Read More… Trace Interviews Step-By-Step
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