Mapping HCI research methods for studying social media interaction: A systematic literature review

In the last decades, researchers in Human-computer interaction (HCI) took numerous efforts to investigate people's social media interaction. To understand how researchers in HCI have studied social media interaction, we examined 149 peer-reviewed articles published between 2008 and 2020 in major HCI conference proceedings and journals. We systematically reviewed the methodologies HCI researchers applied, the research topics these methods covered, and the types of data collected. Through the analysis, we make three contributions: We (1) pinpoint the topic trends by identifying three phases in the study of social media interaction in HCI. Namely, the early phase (2008–2012) focused on user behavior, the growing phase (2013–2016), focused on privacy and health, and the latest phase (2017–2020) focused on design. (2) We map methodological trends in the study of social media interaction in HCI. We also illustrate the trends in relation to the types of data collected in the selected works and, (3) identify underexplored study areas.