Catherine Urquhart

Visiting professor

Methodological implications of social media as a research setting for IS studies in healthcare : Reflections from a grounded theory study

Author

Hamid Pousti
Cathy Urquhart
Frada Burstein
Henry Linger

Editor

Hepu DENG
Craig STANDING

Summary, in English

Over the last decade, social media environments have increasingly become an attractive research setting for Information Systems researchers. However, the methodological implications of this research setting for IS studies, are still not fully understood. In this paper we develop and present a framework to reflect on a recent qualitative healthcare IS study that focussed on the use of social media as a research setting. We argue that focusing on social media as a research setting in qualitative IS study can have implications for the contextualisation of the study (implications for the research paradigm), defining research setting (implications for research design), theoretical sampling (implications for data collection and data analysis), and research ethics (implications for research design). With the popularity and growth of IS studies that focus on social media as a research setting in healthcare context, we conclude by calling for an extensive re-examination of methodological practices to meet the challenge of researching of social media in healthcare.

Publishing year

2013

Language

English

Publication/Series

ACIS 2013: Information systems: Transforming the Future: Proceedings of the 24th Australasian Conference on Information Systems

Links