Facebook Status Updates - a Content Analysis free essay sample

Motivation When analyzing Facebook posts or messages from any other microblogging platform, you can take into account plenty of different aspects. On the one hand you can investigate correlations between posts and demographical aspects of the user, the duration of status updates, intentions of the user to share certain information, simply the content of the post and many more. Since in former research most studies concentrated only on one of these aspects, the connection between two or more of them have not yet been examined. Are, for example, certain topics often mentioned with a certain emotion or intention? Or which topics are the ones people talk negatively about or complain about? In this study the dimensions topic, intention, emotion as well as other components will be put in a relationship. Moreover most of the studies were based on automatic word and content notification software. Our analysis is based on manual work. We will write a custom essay sample on Facebook Status Updates a Content Analysis or any similar topic specifically for you Do Not WasteYour Time HIRE WRITER Only 13.90 / page Often times the real intention or emotional component can only be understood by manually analyzing a Facebook post since many people might use rhetorical expressions, dialects or cryptical messages which cannot be understood by a program. Hence, this could give this study a greater extent of accuracy. Additionally, none of the former research was based only on German status updates what gives the opportunity to draw a comparison between cultures, countries or languages in future studies. Grounded Theory For this study, data analyzing concepts of grounded theory are used. Grounded Theory was introduced in 1967 by Amseln Strauss and Barney Glaser. According o Strauss and Glaser, Grounded Theory is a â€Å"systematic, qualitative process used to generate a theory that explains, at a broad conceptual level, a process, an action, or interaction about a substantive topic† (Creswell, 2002, p 439) To develop a theory out of qualitative data, this approach uses a â€Å"systematic set of processes to develop an inductively derived Grounded Theory about a phenomenon† (Strauss, Corbin, 1990, p24). The three basic elements of Grounded Theory are concepts, categories and propositions. They are part of the data analyzi ng process of Grounded Theory. In this paper we focus only on these three elements. In the next section, we will describe the process of coding based on the provided dataset and present our results of the analyzed data. Case study We analyzed a dataset consisting of 1200 status updates from Facebook in order to give a conclusion about what people talk about on Facebook. Therefore, we conceptualized and analyzed the data like in the following. Developing a Coding Framework According to Strauss and Corbin coding â€Å"†¦represents the operation by which data are broken down, conceptualized, and put back together in new ways. It is the central process by which theories are built from data. † (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, p. 57) To make an analysis feasible, we developed a general coding framework that can be applied on all Facebook status updates. As several people worked on this framework, comparing results was important to receive a consistent list. The development of our coding framework consists of three steps: Developing codes, conceptualization, and developing categorizations. In the following, we elaborate on these three steps. Developing codes. The provided dataset consists of 1200 status updates of German Facebook users. For a start we performed open coding by asking simple questions like: * What is the status update about? * Is a location mentioned? * Is it positive or negative etc. We applied these questions on the first 100 status updates. When we read a post for the first time, we coded it with all associated keywords we could think of. As a result, we received an unsystematic list of keywords that represented our list of codes. Conceptualization. The unsystematic list of codes was used to identify concepts and categories. Comparing the list of codes from each coder leaded us to a more systematic first coding list. Several codes were then summarized under a common name. For example, work and study includes education, school, exam, university, programming, studying, and work. Emotions like afraid, fearing, angry, hating, bothered and stressed were conceptualized to disliking/discomfort. The developed new coding list now consists of several codes or concepts which have several meanings. Developing Categorizations. The final step that concludes the development of our coding framework is to assign categories for each code. Work and study for example fits into the category â€Å"Topic†, disliking/discomfort fits in the category â€Å"Emotion†. Finally we identified eight categories. Any category consists of several concepts that again consist of several meanings. We identified the following categories: Topic, Emotion, Intention, Time, Location, Speech, Valence and Process. Topic, Emotion, Location and the connected codes are self-explanatory. For Time we identified besides past, present and future, the components time pressure, time consuming, countdown, time wasting and long time. Intention explains why a user updates his or hers status update. For example expressing an opinion about something can be used as a code for intention.