ABSTRACT

Studies assessing the effects of social media use are largely based on measures of time spent on social media. In recent years, scholars increasingly ask for more insights in social media activities and content people engage with. Data Download Packages (DDPs), the archives of social media platforms that each European user has the right to download, provide a new and promising method to collect timestamped and content-based information about social media use. In this paper, we first detail the experiences and insights of a data collection of 110 Instagram DDPs gathered from 102 adolescents. We successively discuss the challenges and opportunities of collecting and analyzing DDPs to help future researchers in their consideration of whether and how to use DDPs. DDPs provide tremendous opportunities to get insight in the frequency, range, and content of social media activities, from browsing to searching and posting. Yet, collecting, processing, and analyzing DDPs is also complex and laborious, and demands numerous procedural and analytical choices and decisions.

摘要

评估社交媒体使用效果的研究主要基于对在社交媒体上花费的时间的衡量。近年来，越来越多的学者要求对社交媒体活动和人们参与的内容有更多见解。数据下载包 (DDP) 是每个欧洲用户都有权下载的社交媒体平台档案，它提供了一种新的有前途的方法来收集有关社交媒体使用的时间戳和基于内容的信息。在本文中，我们首先详细介绍了从 102 名青少年收集的 110 名 Instagram DDP 的数据收集的经验和见解。我们依次讨论了收集和分析 DDP 的挑战和机遇，以帮助未来的研究人员考虑是否以及如何使用 DDP。DDP 提供了巨大的机会来深入了解频率、范围、以及社交媒体活动的内容，从浏览到搜索和发布。然而，收集、处理和分析 DDP 也是复杂而费力的，并且需要大量的程序和分析选择和决策。