Social Media Use in Social Movement Organizations: Categorizing and Connecting Analyses in an Exploratory Qualitative Study

Contemporary qualitative researchers must contend with a type of qualitative data that did not exist a quarter-century ago: social media data. Social media has become a fundamental aspect of social life and communication in major segments of the social world. For social movement organizations (SMOs), social media use has become a requirement. SMOs use social media for organizing, communicating information, and building solidarity within their movements. Qualitative research on social movements’ engagement with social media has been growing rapidly, but this work has not extended into the study of Teacher Activist Groups (TAGs). TAGs are a type of SMO featuring collectives of teachers engaged in inquiry, consciousness-raising, and collective action aimed to improve public education. The purpose of the study to be presented was to develop an understanding of the twitter activity of several TAGs. At the 2018 TQR conference, I presented the challenges I faced analyzing social media data during the pilot phase of this study. Specifically, I found that the coding I was using to conduct a qualitative content analysis decontextualized the twitter activity from its local and historical contexts. Coding obscured the real-time nature of twitter activity—how it reflected the news and events of the day—as well as its embeddedness in networks of real people and communities. At the 2019 conference, I will present the ways I addressed these challenges using two different types of qualitative analysis: categorizing through content analysis and connecting through chronological case studies of each group’s twitter activity. After discussing the analytic methods used in the study, I will also present the findings from two of the TAGS featured in the completed study