Thread by @DrPetra

This tweet taking off is a reminder if something supports your world view you’ll like and use it when you should be engaging critical skills. Here are academics enthusiastically sharing a small Twitter poll as a survey. Try sharing useful and nuanced research - tumbleweed 😢

https://twitter.com/dkedrosky/status/1459190556005847045

Also if you’re going to share a poll or anything else your first job is to cite the original. This is basic research practice and it did not happen here as @InductiveStep and others rightly pointed out.

How can we do better when sharing research on academic life?
- use robust research (there’s lots of it)
- cite and link to it
- check against other research
- critique and question
- synthesise research and share
- put it into practice
- tell others how it worked out for you

This shouldn’t be remotely surprising as it’s what we all should be doing in our day jobs (if it is surprising then training is a good plan).
It’s important as otherwise we’ll have short, limited Twitter polls guiding policy and practice when detailed, nuanced work is ignored.

I guarantee you there are loads of papers, books and projects on what academics feel about working/studying in unis (good and bad) and they are useful to draw on when we’re supporting each other in difficult times. But memes, Twitter polls and newspaper headlines are used more 😢

If you look at the quoted tweet it has hundreds of retweets and thousands of likes. It’ll become lore but nobody will recall its origins. The metrics on this tweet and others like it always outweigh the low figures you find when dependable and useful research is shared.

Social media is often credited as a good source of sharing research on academic life, but in reality it isn’t. What is way more popular is anything that allows people to vent and grumble (understandable) which in return creates dominant but inaccurate picture of academia.

And that shouldn’t matter except that we’re in the business of creating, using, critiquing and sharing evidence. If we’re happy to be sloppy in one area it makes other research harder. And it’s the areas where we need rigour to bring urgently needed change where this is worst

All of the above can be todays #ResearchTip 😀
TL;DR - standards, people.
#AcademicChatter #AcademicTwitter #gradschool #PhDHelp #PhDChat #HigherEd #ResearchMethods

Ps. In case you were wondering if you can include Twitter polls in research writing, yes you can. You’d say something like “on x date, y person said on Twitter z thing which was very popular (link/screen grab/metrics). This does/does not match wider evidence (cite) because…”

In this case I’d cite evidence on different ways people feel about academia, why that is, who’s more disadvantaged and maybe include the tweet and responses as one case example of described issues playing out in practice. I wouldn’t lead with it or exclude other literature.

And all that is important because when it comes to #AcademicMentalHealth, safety, ethics, rights and wellbeing there is huge resistance to support students or staff. If your evidence is a Twitter poll or similar genuine grievances are easy to dismiss or even ridicule.