Is Facebook's advertising data accurate enough for use in social science research? Insights from a cross‐national online survey

Social scientists increasingly use Facebook's advertising platform for research, either in the form of conducting digital censuses of the general population, or for recruiting participants for survey research. Both approaches depend on the accuracy of the data that Facebook provides about its u...

Ausführliche Beschreibung

Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Journal of the Royal Statistical Society. Series A, Statistics in society Statistics in society, 2022-12, Vol.185 (Supplement_2), p.S343-S363
Hauptverfasser: Grow, André, Perrotta, Daniela, Del Fava, Emanuele, Cimentada, Jorge, Rampazzo, Francesco, Gil‐Clavel, Sofia, Zagheni, Emilio, Flores, René D, Ventura, Ilana, Weber, Ingmar
Format: Artikel
Sprache:eng
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:Volltext
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Social scientists increasingly use Facebook's advertising platform for research, either in the form of conducting digital censuses of the general population, or for recruiting participants for survey research. Both approaches depend on the accuracy of the data that Facebook provides about its users, but little is known about how accurate these data are. We address this gap in a large‐scale, cross‐national online survey (N = 137,224), in which we compare self‐reported and Facebook‐classified demographic information (sex, age and region of residence). Our results suggest that Facebook's advertising platform can be fruitfully used for conducing social science research if additional steps are taken to assess the accuracy of the characteristics under consideration.
ISSN:1467-985X
0964-1998
1467-985X
DOI:10.1111/rssa.12948