| Abstrakt: |
While composition studies researchers have examined the ways social media are impacting our lives inside and outside of the classroom, less attention has been given to the ways in which social media--specifically Social Network Sites (SNSs)--may enhance our own research methods and methodologies by helping to combat research participant attrition and build a community around a research project. In this article, we share some of the successes and shortfalls of using SNSs for research purposes, based on our own experiences using Facebook in the context of our writing program's Longitudinal Study of Student Writers. Specifically, we present five considerations related to the integration of Facebook for research--Building a Community, Sharing Study Data, Constructing Identity, Understanding Analytics, and Conducting Usability Testing--and we discuss how these methods can be extended to other SNSs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
