Survey of Social Media Data Management Practices

These data are the results of a survey of researchers who use social media data in their research. We recruited respondents through email lists (e.g., AIR-L the listserv for the Association of Internet Researchers), Facebook groups (e.g., Researchers of the Socio-Technical), and investigators’ individual social media accounts. The survey was open from July 31, 2018 to August 21, 2018 and received 73 responses. We offered three $100 Amazon gift certificates as incentives and used random number draws to select recipients. We used Qualtrics to manage our survey and collection of responses. Our survey instrument had five main sections: general and demographic, data acquisition, data transformation, analysis and visualization, and data sharing and reuse. We restricted our demographic data collection to an investigator’s affiliation (e.g., university, government lab) and position (e.g., PhD student, faculty, staff) in order to focus on the researchers’ practices rather than their individual characteristics.