Attribution of Social Media Comments in Research Reports
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jul 12, 2010
Most social media researchers show comments they’ve collected from websites, in order to showcase particular opinions and to add narrative to their quantitative data.
Some researchers will even attribute these comments to the individuals who made them, by name. While they would never do this with survey respondents, due to long-established codes of conduct that forbid it, social media comments seem different: they are publicly accessible through search engines, after all.
In our recent social media listening survey, we asked 426 U.S. online users the following question: “Market researchers may use quotes taken from the Internet in reports and presentations to showcase a typical viewpoint. If it were a quote of something you said about a product or service, how would you prefer they present it?” Respondents were fairly divided:
- 27% said the entire quote should be used, even if it were pages long
- 11% said a small portion of the quote should be used
- 9% wanted their quoted paraphrased
- 21% said it depended on the site where they made the comment
- 19% did not want their comments used at all.
When it comes to attribution, only 7% of U.S. online users surveyed want quotes attributed to them by their real name, though another 20% are willing to have quotes attributed to their screen name. The majority (66%) would prefer not to be identified. Yet researchers who do attribute comments by name point out that, even if they didn’t do so, such quotes can be easily found.
For instance, Ray Poynter, managing director of The Future Place, has frequently cited the Finn and Lavitt study on computer-based support groups for sexual abuse survivors, in which verbatim comments were included without attribution. Unfortunately, because anyone could log in to these communities, they could identify who said what. Similarly, a quoted comment can be easily copied and pasted into a search box, taking you right to the person who made it.
We asked consumers about this issue of their quotes being found in search engines. First, we asked if consumers would prefer that market researchers provide the hyperlink to a comment they made or not: 51% would prefer the researcher link to the comment, 23% would prefer the researcher didn’t, and the remaining 26% didn’t care. For those respondents who did not want a hyperlink provided, we pointed out to them in a subsequent question that the original comment could be found through search engines. As a result, 44% of this group wanted researchers to paraphrase their comments, or 10% of the overall sample. Factoring in the overlap with the 9% who said their default preference was to have quotes paraphrased, 16% of respondents were in favor of having researchers paraphrase their comments.
The most zealous social media researcher should paraphrase every comment they report. There are software tools that will create paraphrases, though the quality of resulting paraphrases is not high.
On the other hand, the pragmatic researcher will use quotes and excerpts of quotes as is, without attribution. Recognizing that such quotes can be found though search engines, if the quote is especially sensitive due to subject matter, then the pragmatic researcher will paraphrase such a quote.
As for those researchers who provide the names of social media commenters, most have simply not yet looked at it through the eyes of the consumer. I am guilty of this practice myself in the past, as it is convenient and makes the quote more “real” in some sense. In my most recent presentation of social media market research results, I did not show any quotes that were included in the study but instead did a live search on Twitter and pointed out some of the recent comments that were indicative of the overall findings. Is this practice better or the same problem in new clothes? I am not sure. Like most researchers, I am still feeling my way.
Comments welcome. Anonymous or otherwise!
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