Facebook as Source of Research Data?
By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on February 25, 2014
The popularity of social networking sites is allowing researchers a unique opportunity to sample peoples opinion on a variety of social issues.
In fact, in a study to demonstrate the potential of using social networking sites for research on health and medicine, researchers studied jokes made about doctors posted on Facebook.
Social networking sites, such as Facebook, have become immensely popular in recent years and present a unique opportunity for researchers to eavesdrop on the collective conversation of current societal issues, said Matthew Davis, Ph.D.,of the Dartmouth Institute of Health Policy & Clinical Practice.
In one of the first studies of social networking site conversations pertaining to health and medicine, Davis and colleagues examined the prevalence and success of doctor jokes posted on Facebook.
The study is published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
The researchers studied more than 33,000 Facebook users, who gave permission to have everything on their Facebook wall monitored, and identified 263 (0.79 percent) Facebook users who posted a joke that referenced doctors during a six-month observation period.
Davis and colleagues studied the characteristics of 156 unique doctor jokes that were associated with getting an electronic laugh (e.g., a LOL, ROTFL) from the social network and the number of Facebook likes jokes received.
Jokes in which the doctor (or the health care system) was the butt of the joke tended to be more successful, although the association was not statistically significant.
Ironically, the joke in the study that received the greatest number of Facebook likes was a doctor, lawyer, priest joke in which the lawyer was the butt of the joke.