ABSTRACT

With the rapid rise of social media and social networking has come dramatic increases in the types of data available to social scientists and the range of questions they can seek to answer. We thus provide readers with a primer on the harvesting and harnessing of social media data for uses in psychological research. We briefly review current social media platforms, providing a summary analysis of the ways data from these sites have been and might be used to examine basic and applied psychological theories. We then review harvesting techniques researchers have pursued in order to obtain data from these sites, listing a number of free and paid resources readers might utilize for their own research investigations. We next review analytic techniques that can be used to harness such data to test hypotheses, giving particular attention to techniques oriented around analyzing both the semantic and non-semantic content of online social postings, and we present predictive and explanatory models that can be employed to analyze social media data. We close by reviewing ongoing challenges and forthcoming promises of research programs that seeks to harvest and harness social media data.