Tapio Yrjölä is Senior Lecturer at Business Information Systems Programme at TAMK (Tampere University of Applied Sciences). He has used data archived at the FSD in his methodology courses for years.

However, he thinks that even though FSD and Aila are useful tools for teaching methodology, TAMK teaching staff in general are not very familiar with them. FSD’s main focus has been to provide data services for research universities but the archive also serves universities of applied sciences.

Tuija Kössö is studying Health Care Engineering at the Tampere University of Applied Sciences, TAMK. She got acquainted with the services of the Finnish Social Science Data Archive (FSD) and Aila Data Service, maintained by the data archive, during a research methods course held by Tapio Yrjölä. Tuija Kössö found the data downloaded from Aila also useful for planning her own Bachelor's thesis. Analysing the questionnaire used in the Family Barometer study gave her tips for the questionnaire design of her own research.

Use of social media as research data is on the rise as the number of social media users increase. However, the scientific community has only recently begun to consider the methods and procedures of analysing and archiving social media data. The greatest barriers to archiving data include the commercial nature of social media services and their terms of service that, at least for now, usually prevent archiving. Social media data is proving to be part of valuable digital cultural heritage. Examining such data can reveal much about communication culture in the 2000s, social networks, information sharing and many other phenomena related to society and human behavior.

Read more in the latest issue of the FSD Bulletin.

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