Discourse-analytical studies on social media platforms: A data-driven mixed-methods approach

As social media platforms have become ubiquitous in everyday life, calls for mixed-methods approaches to studying social media platforms have also increased. Especially following the so-called “computational turn” (Berry, 2011) in media and communication research, we have witnessed the development of novel quantitative approaches, tools, techniques, and methods to study social media platforms. Qualitative studies, in contrast, often continue to draw from traditional methods that are sometimes not well equipped to deal with the particularities of studying these spaces, including their affordances, dataset sizes, systematic sampling and downsizing of data, or simply put, finding the right datasets. This becomes particularly important for studies employing a discourse-analytical perspective. Traditionally, selecting texts for discourse analysis has been straightforward, with researchers using contextual knowledge to select newspapers, articles, television programs, political speeches, and similar texts for qualitative analysis. However, when it comes to social media, especially if the researcher is interested in the broader discursive environment or the everyday communicative practices of social media users, data selection and downsizing becomes more complex...