Cybersecurity Challenges in Social Media Erdal Ozkaya

Chapter Five: Research Methodology 
5.1
 
Preamble
This chapter explains the methodology of research. It looks at the method that was 
used to collect data in this study, the reasons behind the methods, and the data collection 
procedure. 
5.2
 
Data collection methods 
This study will use qualitative research methods to discover the privacy issues that 
users of social media are currently facing and the extent of their impacts. Qualitative research 
methods will come in handy for collecting a lot of diverse and credible data from a 
significantly smaller number of respondents. This will be actualized in the primary data 
sources, whereby a questionnaire will contain many questions but will be intended for a few 
respondents. This will enable the identification of the most intricate details concerning the 
study. In this research, asking each respondent more questions will be better for discovery of 
problems that they are facing rather than if the study used quantitative research methods. The 
main aim is to derive as much data as possible from each single respondent. The study is 
focused on the opinions and attitudes of the users of social media. This is why it will aim at 
extracting all the relevant information that each respondent will give for the study. At the 
end, all that will count is having an in-depth understanding of what issues users are facing 
and how they feel about the privacy and security of several social media platforms.

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5.3
 
Choice of data sources 
The research intends on capitalizing on already existing secondary data and 
complementing it with primary data. The study is aware that there have been other similar 
studies done that may have used more extensive data collection methods and thus, it will be 
of significance to include their search results. This is not a relatively new issue as there exists 
a number of researches into the privacy issues surrounding the social media industry. 
Therefore, there will be some data that will be borrowed from researchers who have 
researched about privacy issues in digital media, especially social media platforms. 
The study, however, has seen it fit to do a primary data collection. This is because 
there have been some evolutions of new privacy settings, new acquisitions of applications, 
and other factors that have changed social media platforms. It is thus important for fresh data 
to be collected from users, especially after they have just witnessed the new changes in the 
various platforms that they are on. The study will give out online-based questionnaires to 
respondents. These questionnaires will revolve around the current situation or atmosphere of 
social media and will try and get as much user feedback as possible. The feedback will be 
concerning the privacy and security issues that the users are now experiencing.