I am having issues comming up with a sociological research topic involving facebook and privacy... any ideas?

[miniaturemeal855]

[radish]

You could use a couple of incidents to discover whether social norms and values are changing.

A.Collect couple of recent examples of either
a)the way that peoples privacy has been undermined through facebook
or
b) the variety of levels of privacy people choose and for whom
http://www.allfacebook.com/facebook-privacy-2009-02
B. Then develop a short questionnaire to pose to a pilot sample of about twenty people to explore peoples cultural norms and values about
-the importance of privacy and
-whether facebook is changing the boundaries of privacy
-whether this matters
-whether there should be more controls over facebook
-how people use the facebook levels to vary their own level of privacy

ie your key concepts in your research study would be:
social norms
social change
the links between technology and culture
values about: privacy/social control

C. In your questionnaire use both closed questions and open-ended questions to get the benefits of both quanititative and qualitative research
http://e-articles.info/e/a/title/Which-a...h-Methods/

D. Before making your decisions about which topic to choose have look through the research on privacy and Facebook that have been published in 'google scholar'
Facebook: 'Threats to Privacy' by Harvey Jones, Jose Hiram Soltren December 14, 2005(an abstract)
There are many others if you enter the key terms into the 'Google Scholar' search engine