This report was submitted to complete the course requirement of "Qualitative & Quantitative Research Methods" at IIIT-Delhi in collaboration with Shubham Singhal.

1. 1
Social Media
The Modern Day Tool for Research
ABSTRACT: The Internet is now about
interactivity and conversation. The current
popularity and exponential growth of users in
social networking sites is drawing attention of
youth. People spend a lot of time in social
networking .These are becoming the modern day
communities where thousands of people connect,
share and express themselves. This paper tries
to study the impacts of social networking on
undergraduate research: How has the present day
Internet social media promoted research among
the undergraduates? Scholars believe that this
era of Facebook has opened up various research
domains for the under-graduates. This paper
would contribute a little in knowing the way
undergraduates are influenced towards research by
social media.
INTRODUCTION
Social Media has become a part and parcel of
our life.People spend a lot of time in the Social
Networking Sites(SNS).They connect to the world
and express themselves.The main aim of this paper
is to find out : how can social media be used in
the field of research. With the increasing number of
users in the SNS,the time they spend on them and
the resources the SNS can provide,it is essential to
know what kind of services it can provide to the
under graduate students and how can it make the life
easier for the under graduate researchers. It is said
social media and SNS are indeed a negative aspect
when it comes to students wasting time on it. But
we have a positive side too. Today the same social
media has grown to such an extent that students can
now benefit from it in the field of research.These
can be put to Evolution of Internet has completely
changed the way of doing research.Earlier Research
was done primarily by reading books,magazines,
personal interviews and observations.
Collecting the data is a huge task. Now with the
evolution of Internet the ways of doing research
have changed completely. Unlimited amounts of
data is available online.Anyone can get the data
from the net easily.The data collected needs to
be analyzed and interpreted in the right way in
order to get the right results.We can definitely do
this by conducting personal interviews,etc.But this
can take a large amount of time and even for
us gathering people,conducting survey is a hectic
task.Social Media brings a excellent solution to all
these problems.We can even know the views and
opinions of distant and unknown person according
to our requirement. We can conduct polls,surveys in
a really effective manner in a really short time.Now
in this paper we want to understand the how the
present day social media promoted research among
the under graduates.This paper tries to overcome the
problems of which are not dealt in other papers of
the same domain.
In changing times when more and more people
are communicating online, Social media is play-
ing an influential role in forming public opinions.
Reaching out to people who earlier were totally
inaccessible has opened up a new domain for bet-
ter data collection. But this source is extremely
unreliable as in presence of thousands of online
users there is potential threat of anonymous entries
which may influence actual conclusion/output of the
research.
Social Media has become a part and parcel
of our life.With the number of facebook users
over 750 million users one can understand that
the people like to connect to the Social Network-
ing Sites.They spend hours of time on SNS.They
share messages,upload images,videos express to
their friends.It provides a great platform where one
can keep in touch with distant friends who would
otherwise wont be in touch.One can go on to chat
with foreigner professors,peers,friends,family and
anyone. So,what we want to say is SNS has all types
of people,from in state users to overseas users.So it
has a great resource power.How is this useful to the
under graduate researchers? Consider an example
to understand it better. Say if we want to know
whether the people think the invention of the SNS

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is good or bad to the society? Then one can just
go on to the SNS and can poll the question.Now
the results would be far more accurate compared
to the results one would have obtained if he had
done it manually because now the sample is far
more representative of the people .Comparatively it
is more accurate,faster,better way of doing research
than the other methods of research.
Social media has gained its significance and
can be used in the field of research for better
and productive research.Yes,it has disadvantages
many or most of the people in the SNS waste
a lot of time in the SNS.In this case not only it
has effected the time but also the research they
would have done if the time is not wasted on
the SNS.But every model has some advantages
and disadvantage.SNS has great power from its
resources,if used effectively,which this paper
focuses on, one can do great researches especially
the under graduates.
SURVEY ANALYSIS
To understand the impact of SNS on Undergrad-
uate researchers, an online survey was conducted.
97 students filled up the survey and submitted
their opinions. It was ensured that the survey was
restricted to the Under Graduates only and each
response is independent of the other response.
A large strata of researchers thinks that social
media is important in todays world (which may be
either as their research topic or as a medium for data
collection). About 80% of the researchers support
the use of social media in modern times. Whereas
about 20% of them have not used Social media yet.
With changing times, it is observed that people are
gradually switching from conventional data collec-
tion sources (i.e. personal interviews or previous
researches) to modern tool of social interaction
through internet. Possible reason for this transit
could be that the social media provides a faster,
easier and economical way for data collection.
A question was asked whether Social Media is
in any way useful for your Research. 80% of the
people feel that Social Media is useful as a part of
their Research. Its an interesting result compared to
the traditional way of doing Research. Traditionally
Books were termed as the Best friends for the
students and SNS had no role to play. But now the
Social Media has gained its own significance. One
can collect data from distant and unknown person
according to the requirement. We can conduct polls
and surveys in a really efficient manner in short
time. A question was asked about the extent to
which Social Media can contribute to Research? It
was observed that majority of the people think SNS
useful part of their research. As one can observe
from the figure, mean is 2.7 which means SNS can
useful for the Under Graduate Research but not very
useful. It may be a bit less than expected because of
various reasons. One important reason is that many
of them have not done research using SNS. This
is supported by the results of the question: How
many times you have used Social Media for your
Research? The result is not surprising as the mean
is just 2.7. Around 40% of the students have not
used Social Media at all in their Research. Around
30% of the students have used the Social Media
just once for their Research. So one can strongly
argue that because there is no exposure among many
students about SNS being used as a tool for the
Under Graduate Research, many students have felt
that SNS cant b be used as a Research tool. So
definitely one can say that Social Media is very
useful tool for Research and the extent to which
it can contribute is high among the users, keeping
in view that around 40% of the students have not
used SNS at all. In order to analyze how these SNS
can be used in Research the following question was
put up: In which way can the Social Media be a
part of your Research?
The major use is in collecting the data from
various sources which contribute to around 73%.
Also one can observe that the overall percentage is
greater than 100% as this is due to multiple answers
possible. An interesting fact one can observe is
around 38% of the people use the Social Media
as a part of their Research. The Research they are
doing is on the Social Media. In the present days
where millions of people spend hours of time in
the SNS there is definetly a need to Research about
various aspects of the SNS. So one can say that SNS
have opened various Research options for the Under
Graduates. 40% of the people use SNS as a means
to communicate with the research collaborators.
From this one can observe that student can take the
opinions, views and help of the collaborator irre-
spective of the time and place. For example student
can send a document of his work over the SNS;
the collaborator can then send his opinions about

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the document, possible draw backs and the areas
where the student can improve. Here student and
the collaborator can be in two different countries
and student doesnt need to halt his research till then.
Whenever required the student can take the opinions
of the collaborator, fix them and continue with the
research.
We have seen that in the previous section that
73% of the students use SNS as a means of col-
lecting data. How do they use SNS in collecting
the data? In order to explore this, a question was
posted. The result concluded that most of them
use Surveys and Polls in order to collect the data.
Again being a multiple option question the overall
percentage exceeded 100%. Surveys in SNS are a
great source of information. We can take the opinion
of whoever we want by just giving the link to the
person. With this we can make sure that there all
kinds of people filling your survey. Our samples can
now actually Representative. People also use direct
communication with the people but using survey is
lot more convenient. We can just post on the peoples
wall whose opinions we want to take and whenever
they come online, they can see the link and fill the
survey. Rather in direct communication it is lot more
difficult to do the same task. Surveys also possess
a great advantage where the privacy of the user can
also be ensured whereas in direct communication
the results may give biased results.
How much reliable (dependable, trustworthy, con-
sistent) is the data collected from Social Networking
Sites (surveys, images, videos etc.)? Though social
media provided an easier way of data collection,
its reliability is questionable. Conducting online
surveys always carry a threat of inconsistent data
aggregation. Anonymity is important but some basic
information about the participants is vital to ensure
usability of participants response. Referencing our
own research for example, its important to consider
only undergraduate participants otherwise the re-
sults cant deliver any explicit conclusion. This con-
cern is not justified by social media. True identity of
the participants cant be verified and hence it (social
media) remains an unreliable and untrusted source
of data. However in collaboration with other data
collection schemes, social media can prove to be
noteworthy.
In order to understand the role of Social Media in
the collection of data another question was posted to
rank the various methods used in the data collection.
It was observed that Social Media got less score
compare to the other traditional methods such as
Books, Magazines. Here one has to observe that
Social Media is a relatively new developing field,
with origins in the last 5-6 years and still it is able to
compete very much as we observe the difference be-
tween the traditional methods of Books, Magazines
and the Social Media. So it has a great scope in the
future and it may certainly overtake the traditional
methods of collecting the data.
Now the final question posted was to study the
amount of time people spend on the SNS. This
summarizes the whole thing why we our research is
of relevance and significance. It studies the amount
of time people spend on SNS. As we observe the
result almost one-third of the people spend more
than 3 hours in the SNS per day. This is a very huge
number. Nearly 85% of the people spend more than
hour in the SNS per day. So it is very important to
study whether the time they spend is contributing to
the Research, which it would have if the SNS was
not there.
ETHICAL ISSUES
Ethical Issues can never be ignored whenever we
carry out Research. Here while designing the ques-
tions for the survey, care has been taken such that
the questions are not biased. No question can be
misleading so as to confuse the survey participants.
An example for misleading question- Do you feel
the data collection from Social Media contributes
to your Research more than the traditional way of
collecting data? the word more is confusing, how
do we measure more? Also care has been taken
not to disclose the identity of the person when
collecting the data. Maintaining the anonymity of
the user ensures privacy to the data and the user can
freely express his opinions. The experiment presents
the facts with evidences. The advantages of social
media an the various ways how social media can be
put to use have been highlighted but the traditional
ways have not been ignored or criticized.