A Critical Reflection on Social Media Research Using an Autoethnographic Approach

The landscape of social research is changing rapidly due to the wealth of data that researchers can use and analyze from the social media engagements of real people. As social media researchers, we use a spectrum of methods to study use and behavior, and the extent to which we engage users in our research affects the knowledge we hope to gain. In this paper, I use an autoethnographic approach to analyze the interplay between my publicly-available social media content, my private social data, and my timeline of lived experience in diagnosis and treatment of Stage IV cancer to demonstrate that the knowledge researchers gain solely from social media data is partial ("almost" knowing). Using the case of my own experience, I argue that research findings through social media, and the knowledge contributed through such research, would be improved by engaging more frequently in qualitative research that includes social media users.