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Information
Social Media Literacy for Human Service Professionals and Scholars
Original Recording Date :
Course Format
Recorded webinar.
Social media is ubiquitous in social life, serving as personal soap box, connection manager, and news outlet. Recent events have highlighted some of the challenges with the pervasiveness of social media, reifying the importance of social media literacy in everyday life. This workshop will introduce audiences to a variety of social media platforms, highlighting challenges and opportunities for leveraging social media data in practice and scholarship. Participants will learn how to navigate the analytic side of social media platforms – including Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram - to gain insight into the most pertinent topics in the communities they serve. Finally, participants will learn basic text mining techniques – using various software - to continue their social media literacy journeys.
Learning Objectives:
- Describe social media and its public data, including benefits and challenges for various marginalized populations
- Examine the analytic side of social media platforms for use in practice and/or scholarship
- Identify basic text mining techniques that can support obtaining greater insights about populations of interest to practice and/or scholarship
Research: This presentation considers information learned during Dr. Rodriguez’s ongoing research.
Target Audience: social workers, mental health practitioners, creative arts therapists, marriage and facility therapists, psychologists, addiction professionals, case managers, and other interested individuals.
Customer ServiceWe are happy to respond to any concerns or questions you may have. Please contact us at by email at sw-ce@buffalo.edu or by phone at 716-829-5841.
ADA Accommodations: If you require any support for your ADA needs in the United States, please contact us by email at least 3 weeks prior to the event by email at sw-ce@buffalo.edu or by phone at 716-829-5841.
Maria Y. Rodriguez, PhD, MSW
Maria Y. Rodriguez, PhD, MSW, joined the University at Buffalo in 2020. Her research is at the intersection of applied demography, computational social science, and social policy. The first line of research examines the ethical implications of algorithmic decision-making in human services, child welfare in particular. The second line of research looks at the lived experience of marginalized communities as described on social media. The through line between the two concerns the methods involved: she identifies as a methodologist in social work spaces, in as far as her substantive focus is on how computational methods can support using large, unstructured data to scale social work interventions. For that reason, Rodriguez founded the caretLAB, the first lab housed in a school of social work to her knowledge dedicated to computational research methods in the public interest. Her lab works with technologists across fields of inquiry to leverage cutting edge, innovative technologies to develop, implement, and evaluate scaled interventions.
