SOCIAL MEDIA SAMPLING 2

Social Media Sampling

Sampling, or choosing participants of a given research, plays a central role in determining
the accuracy of the research’s findings. A good sample should reflect the characteristics of the
general population as much as possible. When the sample is not representative of the general
population being studied the results are likely to be invalid.
For a person with strong political preferences for a given party and having those
preferences shared by many of her friends on Facebook, administering a political survey on
Facebook is going to produce invalid results. This is because the sample is biased in two ways.
First, most of the participants are going to be social media friends who share her views.
Secondly, the participants are likely to be friends who use social media often. The sample is,
therefore, not going to be representative because the characteristics of the sample are not going
to represent the general population. The results will be heavily skewed in favor of the
researcher’s political position.
As this example shows, social media is not a good platform for sampling. If researchers
only use their friends, the sample will exclude non-friends. The sample will, therefore, be filled
with participants who presumably share the researcher’s demographic characteristics and
opinions. If they use a Facebook page which includes both friends and non-friends, participants
are going to be people interested in the subject of the page or those who regularly use Facebook.
Older people, for instance, are not regular social media users and, therefore, may not be captured
in such samples. In general, samples obtained on social media are unlikely to be representative of
the general population. The results obtained using such samples are, therefore, going to be
invalid.

SOCIAL MEDIA SAMPLING 3
In conclusion, even though social media provides researchers a platform to cheaply and
quickly get samples, the samples may not yield useful results. This is because they often do not
represent the general characteristics of the population that is being studied.