The Context

This paper will look at the use of Facebook as a data collection tool in auto/biographical studies. Given the international saturation of online social networks, of which Facebook is by far the biggest (Anderson et al., 2012), among those of school and university-going age, it is surprising that this has received little attention before. Academic social scientists have so far concentrated on Facebook as a way of identifying or sourcing research subjects (Baltar and Brunet, 2012), or have studied particular phenomena as they occur on Facebook, like the process of “friending” or “unfriending” (Courtois et al., 2012), or the use of the network for bullying (Kwon & Skoric, 2013), or they have looked at the differences in usage among different social groups (Lim et al., 2013). There have also been studies looking at narrative biographical information provided via blogging services like Blogger and Wordpress, or so-called micro-blogging services, like Twitter (Ressler et al., 2012). However, the use of Facebook as a tool in the collection of auto/biographical data has received little academic attention.

Research Questions

This paper aims to supplement this work, by asking, firstly “What biographical information can be gleaned from the Facebook accounts of undergraduate university students?” and secondly “What can the information gleaned from the Facebook accounts of undergraduate university students tell us about the formation and self-formation of their identities?”

Objectives of this paper

The aim of this paper is to assess the efficacy of Facebook as a data collection tool in auto/biographical studies.  It will investigate the amount and type of information a Facebook account can and does reveal and will inquire as to who the author of this information is.  It will examine issues of trustworthiness and validity and will assess the biases that are present in the information as presented on a Facebook account. Finally, it will review the possible applications of the data generated from Facebook in auto/biographical research on young people.

Theoretical Background

The background for this paper lies in a study being conducted as part of a PhD thesis on gender and identity in education. This study has its theoretical background in the relatively new field of masculinities, and is grounded in the work of RW Connell. She lays out a model for “gender regimes”, shifting milieus of gender structures and hierarchies, which are made up of hegemonic, complicit, subordinated and marginalised masculinities, and are culturally and historically specific (2005, p. 77). This study views the work on the structuration of masculinities through the more inter-subjective and subjective lens provided by Charles Taylor’s work on identity. His position is that an identity claim is a moral claim and that a statement on who we are is an implicit acknowledgement of a specific view of the “good”(1989, p.27).

In order to examine the identities in question, a narrative approach was taken whereby four research subjects, all young male undergraduates, laid out their life stories. Among the research-collection instruments employed to gather these auto/biographies were the research subjects’ Facebook accounts. 

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