Today, researchers are using LinkedIn data in a variety of ways: to find and recruit participants for research and experiments (Using Facebook and LinkedIn to Recruit Nurses for an Online Survey), to analyze how the features of this network affect people’s behavior and identity or how data is used for hiring and recruiting purposes, or most often to enrich other data sources with publicly available information from selected LinkedIn profiles (Examining the Career Trajectories of Nonprofit Executive Leaders, The Tech Industry Meets Presidential Politics: Explaining the Democratic Party’s Technological Advantage in Electoral Campaigning).
Read MoreFacebook is yet again dominating news headlines, this time for its #10YearChallenge encouraging users to post pictures of themselves from 10 years ago and today. While ostensibly a fun and trivial exercise, the viral challenge raised questions regarding whether the game was initiated by Facebook to gather data on its users. This led Zak Doffman to claim in Forbes, “The world of Big Data has clearly changed in the last year”.
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