Representativeness of Social Media in Great Britain: Investigating Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google plus , and Instagram
Representativeness of Social Media in Great Britain: Investigating Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, Google plus , and Instagram
复制标题
DOI：
10.1177/0002764217717559
复制
发表时间：
2017-06-01
影响因子：
3.2
通讯作者：
Lutz, Christoph
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Blank, Grant;Lutz, Christoph
社会学研究表明，不同人群的互联网接入、技能、用途和结果各不相同。然而，我们缺乏不同社交媒体平台用户社交特征的差异化统计证据。我们利用英国的一项具有代表性的调查来解决这个问题，并调查了六大社交媒体平台的社交特征。我们发现，年龄和社会经济地位是这些平台中的几个，但不是所有的驱动力。调查结果表明，没有一种社交媒体平台能代表大众。这种不具代表性对使用社交媒体作为数据源的研究具有重大影响。社交媒体数据不能用来概括除他们自己以外的任何人群。
Sociological studies show that Internet access, skills, uses, and outcomes vary between different population segments. However, we lack differentiated statistical evidence of the social characteristics of users of distinct social media platforms. We address this issue using a representative survey of Great Britain and investigate the social characteristics of six major social media platforms. We find that age and socioeconomic status are driving forces of severalbut not allof these platforms. The findings suggest that no social media platform is representative of the general population. The unrepresentativeness has major implications for research that uses social media as a data source. Social media data cannot be used to generalize to any population other than themselves.