A Research Design for the Examination of Political Empowerment Through Social Media

Abstract

The chapter presents a research design for examining social media use in political contexts, framed as the methodology community case study. The main difference from a traditional case study is that the focus is on online communities rather than single organizations. The chapter presents the case study methodology along with the individual methods that have been applied in community case studies: interviews, stakeholder analysis, the Delphi method, social network analysis (and other digital methods), document, and genre analysis. The chapter concludes by discussing possible types of insights gained through applying these methods, and presenting a few example findings from previous research. The design has been successfully applied in the author's PhD thesis and later work, and is presented here in the hope that it might provide aid and inspiration for graduate students facing similar research problems.