Wednesday 22 August 2012

Making an impact on policy and practice with social media research – exciting news about our next tweet chat

We have decided to run a monthly tweet chat following the success of our first chat at the end of July.

Our next chat will be held on Wednesday 29th August 5-6pm BST and the topic will be how we can ensure that the research we conduct using social media is being understood, appreciated and used by stakeholders and decision makers in policy and practice.

We hope you can join us on Twitter, just follow the #NSMNSS to join in. Read our earlier blog for more detailed guidance on taking part in a tweet chat.

Gareth Morrell, Senior Research Director at NatCen Social Research, has posed a set of interesting questions for us to address during the chat so please get your thinking hats on and spread the word!

The questions:

Q1. How can social media data help to inform policy and practice?
Q2. How can researchers engage better with policy and practice on this issue and vice versa?
Q3. Is there an appetite for using this data among policy-makers and practitioners?
Q4. What concerns do stakeholders in policy and practice have about these new methods?

We will continue the discussion after the chat on our Methodspace pages and are looking to compile a series of case studies and lessons learnt by network members from their experiences of making use of social media platforms and methods for applied policy research.

The tweet chat, and the examples we gather, will help us in building a picture of how new social media research is being adopted or used in policy and practice and will contribute to an additional event that the NSMNSS team are planning with NESTA around how useful new social media methods might be to applied policy research in the future. This will be a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of these new approaches and methods to research commissioners from a broad range of organisations so we will really value your input.

You can read the transcript from our first tweet chat here.

Kandy Woodfield