“Student Perceptions of Writing Instruction: Twitter as a Tool for Pedagogical Growth”

by Sarah Lonelodge and Katie Rieger | Xchanges 15.1, Spring 2020

Research Design and Methodology

Designing this study as an analysis of tweets was a conscious and careful decision that best fit the purpose of the research as Twitter is often used as a way to publicly post thoughts and is available to anyone. Two notes about this claim should be noted. Firstly, Twitter does allow tweets to be private, if a user selects those privacy settings. Secondly, many scholars suggest that researchers still be extra sensitive and consider ethical implications when collecting social media (Fiesler & Proferes, 2018; Hibbin, Samuel, & Derrick, 2018; McKee & Porter, 2008; Zimmer, 2010). These ethical considerations will be explored in the following section.

In order to fully and fairly investigate the research questions, we employed grounded theory because it offers a blueprint for the systematic analysis of large amounts of data, as we describe in later sections. Louis Cohen, Lawrence Manion, and Keith Morrison (2011) argue that grounded theory allows the theory to emerge from the data as a consequence of systematic data collection and analysis rather than a set of predefined categories to be tested. Rather than, for example, searching tweets for themes in student surveys, grounded theory allowed us to consider the full meaning of each tweet and preserve student voices. Our goal was not to place these tweets within our current concepts of student perspectives but to consider that students may have more to say.