Social media data (NVivo 15 Windows)

You can import social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube that you have collected with NCapture.

Understand what is imported

NCapture has specific capture types for social media content from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Once your NCapture file is imported into NVivo, you may see one or more files depending on the content that has been captured. Capture options

Twitter

A survey is created containing the Tweets you have captured. Any hyperlinks in the Tweets are retained. If a Tweet includes a link to a media file the media file is not imported into your project, but you can access it from the hyperlink.

If the Tweets are the results of a search in Twitter, you can click the link in the Search Term column in the survey to perform a new search in Twitter.

By default, user information such as gender or location will be imported along with the Tweets. If this isn't relevant to your research, you can change this behavior in the project properties.

NOTE  Due to the recent change in the Twitter API, there is a limitation applied to the number of tweets each user can capture per month. You might notice a decrease in the number of tweets in the captured survey.

Facebook

A survey is created containing the Facebook posts you have captured. Any hyperlinks from the posts are retained in the file.

Photos that have been made public are imported into NVivo as separate picture files, and stored in a folder at the same location as the Facebook survey. The survey contains a source shortcut that links to the picture. If you click on this shortcut the picture will open in the Detail View. If you code this shortcut, the entire picture file is coded.

By default, user information such as gender or location will be imported along with the posts. If this isn't relevant to your research, you can change this behavior in the project properties.

NOTE  As the Facebook Groups API has been deprecated, you can no longer capture surveys for Facebook groups. For more information, see Groups API.

NOTE  You may notice a change in the level of detail accessible about users, friends and pages. These have been reduced to protect user privacy.

YouTube

You can capture either the video only or the video and comments. If you choose to capture both the video and comments a video file and a survey file are created in a new folder when your NCapture file is imported into NVivo.

The YouTube video is not embedded in your project or downloaded to your computer. You need an internet connection to play these videos in NVivo. If the video is removed from YouTube you will no longer be able to play it in NVivo.

Explore your data

• Use the sort or filter functions to see patterns in your data. For example, you can filter Tweets to only show those made by a specific user or during a specific date range.
• Hide columns to limit the amount of data you are looking at—for example, you could hide the Location column.
• Manually code data at codes representing themes or cases representing people.
• Use automatic coding techniques to perform broad-brush coding.
• Run a Word Frequency query to identify common themes.
• Run a Text Search query to find all instances of a particular word or phrase.

Click the tabs in Detail View to get a different perspective of your data. Some of these options are specific to the type of content captured.

• Form View the data one record at a time, laid out as a form.
• Cluster Analysis Display a diagram that can help you to see patterns in the data—for example, which Twitter users used similar words. Use the options on the Cluster Analysis tab to change the display of the diagram.
• Map Geovisualize the data—for example, to see the geographic spread of social media commentators.
• Chart Display a chart of your Twitter data. Use the options on the Chart tab to change the display of the chart—for example, click Select Data to change the X-axis to display hashtags or a timeline of Tweets.
• Twitter Sociogram Displays a sociogram of your Twitter data to see the network of Twitter users and how they are connected by retweets and mentions.

Gather data over time

Each time you capture data, a new NCapture file is created. When you import NCapture files into your project, by default, any matching social media surveys are merged together.

To be considered matching, the social media properties of the surveys need to be the same:

• Facebook surveys are considered to be matching if they contain wall posts for the same Page, or Group.
• Twitter surveys are considered to be matching if they are based on the same search, user stream, or list.
• YouTube surveys must be for the same video and have the same name.

When matching surveys are merged, any duplicate content is removed.

For example, imagine that you capture Twitter data for the hashtag #climate on Monday and import the NCapture file into your project. Then, on Tuesday and again on Wednesday you also capture Tweets based on the hashtag #climate. When you import these NCapture files into your project, by default, the Tweets from Tuesday and Wednesday are merged together with the survey from Monday to create a single survey. You can also view a timeline to see trends over time by displaying a chart of Tweets over time.