Improving investigations through utilising technology, community and psychology [Ref 1.06]

The project employed an RCT approach, which revealed that use of social media is likely to affect the visual evidence provided by an eyewitness. In addition, a qualitative approach was employed to explore the action orientation of small stories on the Facebook sites of two UK police forces.

The research recognises that increasingly, through the use of Facebook, ‘networked narratives’ are constructed collectively by multiple narrators (both the formal police posts, and the comments of the public).

Given the ability of narrative to both ‘tell’ and ‘sell’ versions of events, and of social media to perform ‘identity in interaction’ this research considered how the police forces are positioned, and repositioned by this social media activity.

Planned outputs