The proliferation of social media use has provided new avenues for social science research, both in relation to the quantitative description of social media data and when it comes to identifying the effects of social media interactions or experiences on political and social outcomes. Moreover, due to the COVID-19 pandemic much of social and political life moved online, providing new opportunities for social media-based field experimentation.

This workshop takes up this development and introduces how social media can be used as a platform to conduct digital field experiments. Social media-based field experiments hold a lot of promise but equally pose numerous methodological and ethical challenges. These challenges are also common in other contexts, but often aggravated as social media is all about interaction; hence how can the non-interference assumption plausibly hold? Previous studies have shown that the effects of social media interventions are small, but if they exist (and can be identified), they are potentially important because interventions are scalable. Additionally, social media-based field experiments face the challenge that many platforms only allow researchers to target users via geographical or demographic clusters, with important implications for experimental design. Moreover, targeting individuals on social media and measuring outcomes has important ethical and data protection implications. How can we deal with these common challenges in our experimental designs? This workshop gives best-practice advice and sets out how different research teams have dealt with these questions. The workshop includes hands-on applications, such as the implementation of experimental treatments on social media and experimental data analysis.

 

Organisational structure of the course

Participants will find the course useful if:

By the end of the course participants will:

Software and hardware requirements

R and R Studio (the latest version)