The present research adopted, therefore, a sequential-explanatory MM approach, combining online surveys to telephone and face-to-face semi-structured interviews. This section describes in detail the research process.
Participants’ eligibility: To be eligible for the present study participants had to be Facebook users, between the age of 18 and 65, and either British or Italian citizens.
Underage users were excluded from the study in order to avoid ethical issues. Users over 65 years were not considered because they represent a very small fraction of the Italian and British Facebook populations, and finding participants for this age group could have proved problematic (see Facebook statistics in Appendix A).
Timescale of data collection: The data collection for the quantitative and qualitative phases occurred in both countries mostly during a non-electoral period, from March to December 2012. In the ten months during which the data collection was carried out, local elections were held in Italy and the UK in the first weeks of May while no other elections were held in the remaining nine months. Surveys were circulated on Facebook between March and June, and interviews held between October and December.
Piloting the questionnaire: Before starting the quantitative data collection, two pilot surveys were distributed to a convenience sample of 12 BPs and 12 IPs. Having completed the surveys, participants were asked the following questions:
a) How long did the questionnaire take?
b) Were all the words understood?
c) Were there any questions you found difficult to understand and/or reply to?
d) Was there anything else you did not understand?
e) How did you find the questions’ sequencing and questionnaire layout?
f) Do you have any suggestions to improve the survey?
Participants’ comments and suggestions were considered and minor changes related to the structure of the survey and the wordings of questions were implemented.
Quantitative research process: Two questionnaires (see Appendix E), one for the IS and one for the BS were created through the website Bristol Online Surveys (www.survey.bris.ac.uk). The questionnaires were identical with the exception of minor modifications on some items to reflect differences in language or relevant options (i.e., party affiliation and political knowledge, see pp. 305-307 and 315-317). For the first quantitative
phase, the intended strategy was to randomly select a series of Facebook groups, and circulate the questionnaires among their members. The criterion for the group selection was to identify groups containing in their titles the names of the five biggest British and Italian cities in terms of population. The ten groups with the most members were chosen for each city. Among these, three groups for each city were randomly selected and questionnaires posted on their walls. The idea was to focus on non-political groups rather than political ones so as to include in the sample both politically active and less politically active users.
However, after circulating the questionnaires in various Facebook groups for a period of ten days, no responses were recorded. At this point, it was thought that the recurrence on Facebook of malicious links and hoaxes could have impacted negatively on users’
willingness to click on a link from an unknown source. For this reason, snowball sampling was used instead of random sampling, and a new recruitment strategy devised. In the new recruitment strategy, again Facebook was used as the recruitment platform. The researcher approached several of his Facebook contacts who were part of his social and professional circles, who fitted the eligibility criteria for the study, and who guaranteed a certain degree of variation in terms of demographics and levels of Facebook and political activity. These potential participants were provided with two links, one to the survey and the other to a website which offered information about the study (https://sites.google.com/site/projectqmu and https://sites.google.com/site/progettoqmu). They were asked to complete the online questionnaires and circulate them among their network. In addition, given that the great majority of initial BPs were Scottish, it was requested that the first wave of recruits target English, Welsh and Northern Irish friends, to guarantee as balanced as possible a representation of the countries of the Union.
Post-stratification of the quantitative samples: To further increase the representativeness of the recruited samples, a post-stratifying criterion was also applied. Age was chosen as a stratifying criterion for two reasons. The first reason was related to the availability of Facebook statistics. The main source of Facebook statistics used in this thesis was the website Socialbakers, which only provided statistics on the age composition of the British and Italian Facebook populations and did not offer any data in relation to other demographic variables such as gender, education and occupational levels (see Appendix A). The second reason was the relevance of age to the political participation phenomenon (as discussed in Section 2.1.2). Through a series of calculations, it was ensured that the age group ratios of the two samples were consistent with the ones of the target populations (see Appendix B for a calculation of the age ratios). The quantitative data collection ended once the required
number of participants for each age group was reached. In certain age groups (i.e., 18-24;
25-35; and 45-65) participants exceeded the required number. In this case, some participants were randomly selected and excluded from the study. Thus from the initial 483 participants, 196 for the BS and 196 for the IS were randomly selected according to their age.
Qualitative research process: A total of 26 telephone/face-to-face semi-structured interviews – 13 with BPs and 13 with IPs – were held. The purpose of the qualitative strand was to explain and develop quantitative results. In order to achieve this goal, the quantitative sample was utilised as the sampling frame for the subsequent qualitative phase. At the end of the online survey, respondents were asked to provide their contact details if they wanted to take part in an interview. As for the first quantitative stage, in the qualitative phase a non-probability sampling strategy was used. The selection of the qualitative sub-sample occurred according to several criteria such as the identification of particularly significant quantitative results, unexpected non-significant quantitative results, extreme cases and demographics.
The intent was to generate qualitative samples which would vary in terms of age, gender, and levels of Facebook, Internet, and offline political participation and Facebook non-political activity (see Appendix D for the composition of the qualitative samples and participants’ profiles). Through this purposive process 10 BPs and 11 IPs were selected. The remaining participants were recruited through a further snowballing procedure. This second sampling stage was not anticipated and was implemented because among the respondents who volunteered for the interviews, there were no political activists between the age of 18-24 and individuals with very limited levels of political activity and engagement. It was deemed that these two profiles were needed to offer a full account of the contributions of Facebook to political participation.
Rewards: Incentives in the form of gift certificates were used to promote the participation in the online surveys and interviews, a strategy also adopted in other studies focusing on SNSs (Vitak et al., 2011; Zube et al., 2009). To encourage the participation in the quantitative phase participants were entered in a draw. One BP and one IP were then randomly selected and awarded a £30 and a €30 voucher respectively, while a £10 or a €10 voucher were offered to all participants for taking part in the interviews.