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Paper short abstract:

Basing on the experience of digital anthropology research of online narratives and narration practices of people with diabetes in Russia, the paper will critically engage on the potential and limitations of social media study in the field of medical anthropology.

Paper long abstract:

Research of everyday life with a chronic disease or along with a person with one necessarily requires in-depth analysis of vernacular narratives and practices. One of the principal sources for such narratives are public spaces of social media, where people explore others’ experiences of life with disease, share emotions, develop strategies of coping, self-help and collaboration with medical specialists.

Within a research based on the general framework of the global “Cities Changing Diabetes” project (Novo Nordisk, UCL), we initiated a specific step in Russia: a digital anthropology research to collect data on requests, values, practices and vulnerabilities of the people with diabetes basing on their unprovoked judgments in social media. The key target of this research was to define the barriers to diabetes compensation practices, and settle hypothesis for the qualitative stage of research. Among the key findings were significant gender differences of social media activity, differences based on the type of disease (T1D and T2D), and barriers not only for medical compliance or conducting healthy life style among people with diabetes, but also barriers for mutual help and collaboration.

However, extracting relevant and representative meaning from a vast corpus of narratives (in our case, almost 500 000) using either algorithmic or qualitative approaches is anything but unproblematic. The presented paper will critically engage on the ethics, potential and limitations of investigating social media data for this purpose, reflect on the use of qualitative and quantitative methods in social media research and outline of the “diabetes media environment” in Russia.