My research took an interesting turn when I invited one of my daughters to explore the role of social media in the identity positioning of one particular study abroad sojourner – herself. We focused on her use of Facebook and that project resulted in an article for the Canadian Journal of Applied Linguistics. Not only did we learn a great deal about how she, as a study abroad sojourner, used Facebook to position herself as an emerging bilingual over the course of two sojourners, but learned that there was so much more to using Facebook to study abroad than I had first thought.
I had once read a great book about EBay and its history. I believe it was The Perfect Store by Adam Cohen. It provided an overview of how it came to be as well as how the platform evolved over time. Although it is now dated, I felt it provided the perfect example of a storehouse of apparent trivia that a researcher might appreciate when studying EBay. Unfortunately, such a book does not exist for Facebook. While the history of how it started is well known and has it’s own movie, documentation of its evolution is much harder to track down. On top of that, when Facebook changes, it does so retroactively, so you can’t look back at your older Facebook posts to get a sense of what used to be. As a researcher, it is frustrating to realize that you can’t easily and reliably claim that Facebook was a certain way at the time of the research.
So, after the first article was written, my daughter and I embarked upon a project about a project – exploring the methodology of using Facebook to research study abroad. In doing so, some questions were answered – we connected with researchers who shared how they establish procedures and came across this nugget: a Wikipedia entry for Facebook Features (not Facebook history which one usually discovers first). Our work resulted in an article that is currently under consideration for another journal. Stay tuned to this space to learn more!
Update: You can find our methodological article here:
Dressler, R., & Dressler, A. (2019). The methodological affordances and challenges of using Facebook to research study abroad. Study Abroad Research in Second Language Acquisition and International Education, 4(1), 126-144.