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Facebook post data: a primer for educational research

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Abstract

Facebook is widely used and researched. However, though the data generated by educational technology tools and social media platforms other than Facebook have been used for research purposes, very little research has used Facebook posts as a data source—with most studies relying on self-report studies. While it has historically been impractical (or impossible) to use Facebook as a data source, the CrowdTangle platform allows academic researchers to freely access the massive collection of posts on public Facebook pages and groups. In this paper, we first outline how interactions and textual features in these public Facebook data in concert with established methods from educational data mining and learning analytics can be used to scrutinize educational discourse and knowledge sharing at scale. We then provide a primer that offers considerations for researchers before collecting these data (i.e., conducting research ethically and framing the study). The tutorial also covers matters directly pertaining to using CrowdTangle: accessing the CrowdTangle platform, uploading or identifying pages (or groups), and downloading historical data and it includes code using the statistical software and programming language R. We conclude with ideas for future directions for using Facebook posts as data with a focus on how educational researchers can leverage the scale of the available data and the time periods for which data is available to study educational affairs (i.e., issues or topics) and individuals (i.e., people or organizations) and to scrutinize how Facebook itself is used.

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Data availability

The analytic code and other files (except for the historical data, which must be accessed through CrowdTangle) is available at https://osf.io/jhnrb/?view_only=43f2da07eee14feb90fcb1755bbdbcfe.

Notes

  1. Resources for getting started with CrowdTangle https://www.crowdtangle.com/resources/best_practices.

  2. See for example < blinded for peer review>.

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  1. Conrad Borchers, Joshua M. Rosenberg and Rita M. Swartzentruber have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh, 15213, USA

    Conrad Borchers

  2. University of Tennessee, 1122 Volunteer Blvd, Knoxville, TN, 37996, USA

    Joshua M. Rosenberg & Rita M. Swartzentruber

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  1. Conrad Borchers
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Correspondence to Joshua M. Rosenberg.

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Borchers, C., Rosenberg, J.M. & Swartzentruber, R.M. Facebook post data: a primer for educational research. Education Tech Research Dev 71, 2345–2364 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-023-10269-2

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