We have a new chapter out in the Research Handbook on Social Media and Society, edited by Marko M. Skoric and Natalie Pang. The handbook blurb is:
As social media scholarship matures, early optimism has been replaced by a more complex and arguably gloomier picture of the role of digital media platforms in our lives. This incisive Research Handbook showcases the academic community’s responses to key societal challenges posed by evolving social media ecologies.
Our chapter is titled ‘Looking back on the scroll back: reflections on the social media scroll back method’, led by Claire Moran and co-authored with Elianne Renaud, Taylor Annabell, and Fan Yang. This was a great opportunity to work with four researchers who have used the social media scroll back method, expanded on it, improved it, critiqued it, and pushed it in new directions. Thank you Claire, Eli, Taylor and Fan!
The intro to our chapter:
As much of our lives are recorded on, organised through, and reflected upon via social media, these channels of communication, news, and social connection come to serve as important digital traces of lives. With their widespread uptake, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Snapchat, and TikTok also become important research sites to understand politics, identity, belonging, the flow of information, and history.
The ‘social media scroll back’ method (Robards & Lincoln 2017) is a qualitative research method, usually undertaken during one-on-one interviews, where a researcher and participant ‘scroll back’ through the participant’s social media together, to collaboratively make sense of social media in a research context. The ‘scroll back’ can be used to scroll through a profile on Instagram or a newsfeed on Facebook or a comment history on Reddit, with the participant in control (on a computer or smartphone, for instance). The researcher and participant become ‘co-analysts’ of the digital traces inscribed on social media by the participant, with the researcher prompting and asking questions, while the participant reflects, interprets, and provides context. The scroll back puts the participant in the ‘driver’s seat’ of the interview, allowing them to take the researcher in different directions, as they can choose to dwell on and explain or scroll past the digital traces that make up their profiles and feeds. Participants give context to the content that is scrolled through, providing deeper meanings and ‘shaping the matter that comes to matter’ (Robards & Lincoln, 2017, p. 716).
In this chapter, we seek to extend understandings and applications of the social media scroll back method as developed by Robards and Lincoln (2017, 2019), as influenced by Ferreday and Locke (2007), Dobson (2012), and Marwick and boyd (2014). To do this, we present four case studies on how the social media scroll back method has been advanced and extended in four separate research projects by: Moran, in a study on the social media experiences of African young people in Australia; Renaud, in a study on the use of Instagram by queer femmes in Australia and North America; Annabell, in a study on the use of Instagram and Facebook by young women in London; and Yang, in a study on the use of WeChat Official Accounts by Australian-Chinese media professionals. The chapter is co-authored with each of these researchers, who provide reflections on their use of this approach in separate case studies.
Our case studies cover a range of different research topics (national identity, race, sexuality, gender, and media industries), groups of participants (migrants, women, queer femmes, and media workers), across different social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and WeChat), and through a variety of modes of engaging with participants ( in-person, via video conferencing, synchronously, and asynchronously). Throughout this chapter we seek to provide a set of examples on how the social media scroll back method might work in different research contexts. We engage with challenges and opportunities, as well as ethical dilemmas, limitations, and possibilities for future research.
https://www.e-elgar.com/shop/gbp/research-handbook-on-social-media-and-society-9781800377042.html
Brady Robards 