Abstract
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 uses social media as a research setting. We argue that using social media as a research setting in qualitative IS studies 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 social media as a research setting in healthcare IS studies, we conclude by calling for an extensive re-examination of methodological practices to meet the challenge of researching of social media settings in healthcare.
Recommended Citation
Pousti, Hamid; Burstein, Frada; Urquhart, Cathy; and Linger, Henry, "Methodological implications of Social Media as a research setting for IS healthcare studies: Reflections from an interpretative case study" (2013). ACIS 2013 Proceedings. 151.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2013/151