I love social media research because: You can have it qual or quant or qualiquant #9 #MRX

I recently wrote a blog post citing ten of the things I love about social media research. Today I address love #9.

Social media research lets you be quantitative, qualitative, or qualiquant.

Some methods of research force you into one vein. Surveys by nature are very quantitative – radio buttons, multi-selects, grid questions, scales. Focus groups are qualitative by nature – people talk and share and communicate in sentences and paragraphs.

Social media research gives you the best of all worlds. We’re already familiar with the qualitative part as the raw data that is social media data is phrases, sentences, comments, and essays.Qualitative researchers have extensive experience in breaking down those messages into their key components and generating useful tidbits of knowledge.

But social media research is, at the same time, very quantitative. In it’s most basic format, you can count how many messages are created on a daily, weekly, or quarterly basis. You can count how long or short the messages are and where they come from. But you can go far beyond that and quantitatively measure the sentiment and topics of conversation just as you would if you were working with survey data.

Qual: Definitely. Quant: Absolutely. Quali-quant: Absoposilutely.