When I was in grad school I did a study which included a quantitative component on Twitter sentiment and an ethnographic component where I actually found tweeps and interviewed them.
The result showed that many of the people tweeting about this particular topic were real, but that in the case I was studying, none of the interactions led to any real world change (I was looking at an anti-corruption campaign by a certain police force. While many people reported corruption via Twitter as instructed, nothing was ever done with their reports).
If I had only looked at Twitter and not gone out into the field, the result would have looked very different. Instead it revealed that this was a clear PR campaign by the police force, not a serious attempt to root out corrupt behavior.
zazaza89 t1_ixr24s9 wrote
Reply to comment by UniversalMomentum in Polarization around climate change is growing on Twitter. Since COP21, engagement with climate sceptics has grown 4 times faster than pro-climate content. At the same time, criticism of the COP summits as a failure has grown 5-fold. by fractalfalcon
When I was in grad school I did a study which included a quantitative component on Twitter sentiment and an ethnographic component where I actually found tweeps and interviewed them.
The result showed that many of the people tweeting about this particular topic were real, but that in the case I was studying, none of the interactions led to any real world change (I was looking at an anti-corruption campaign by a certain police force. While many people reported corruption via Twitter as instructed, nothing was ever done with their reports).
If I had only looked at Twitter and not gone out into the field, the result would have looked very different. Instead it revealed that this was a clear PR campaign by the police force, not a serious attempt to root out corrupt behavior.