Since 2013, we have developed and perfected a method for surveying representative samples of Twitter users who engaged with particular conversations during a certain period of time. The method, first pioneered by Leticia Bode of Georgetown University and colleagues, consists of the following steps:

Crawling public content on Twitter for keywords relevant to our research interests (e.g. names of parties, party leaders, or candidates) in a certain period of time
Extrapolating the usernames who posted at least one relevant keyword
Drawing random samples of those users
Contacting these users on Twitter to ask them to take a survey
Recording Informed consent as part of the survey
Rendering the survey data entirely anonymous to preserve respondents’ privacy

Our surveys aim to understand how respondents use digital and social media in combination with traditional media to get and share information on politics as well as to engage with politics in a variety of ways that take place both online and in face-to-face contests.

So far, we have conducted surveys in Australia, Germany, Italy, and the United Kingdom. The results of these surveys have already been presented in various published works:

Chadwick. A., O'Loughlin, D., & Vaccari, C. (2017). Why People Dual Screen Political Debates and Why It Matters for Democratic Engagement. Forthcoming in Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.
Vaccari, C., Chadwick, A., & O'Loughlin, B. (2015). Dual screening the political: Media events, social media, and citizen engagement. Journal of Communication, 65(6), 1041-1061. The article won the 2016 Walter Lippmann award for the best article in political communication published in 2015.
Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberá, P., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2016). Of Echo Chambers and Contrarian Clubs: Exposure to Political Disagreement Among German and Italian Users of Twitter. Social Media+ Society, 2(3), 2056305116664221.
Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberá, P., Bonneau, R., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. A. (2015). Political Expression and Action on Social Media: Exploring the Relationship Between Lower‐and Higher‐Threshold Political Activities Among Twitter Users in Italy. Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication, 20(2), 221-239.
Vaccari, C., Valeriani, A., Barberá, P., Bonneau, R., Jost, J. T., Nagler, J., & Tucker, J. (2013). Social media and political communication: a survey of Twitter users during the 2013 Italian general election. Rivista italiana di scienza politica/Italian political science review, 43(3), 381-410.

If you have been contacted and invited to take part in one of our surveys, you can direct any queries to Cristian Vaccari via email or directly on Twitter. Please rest assured that we will not contact you more than once unless you allow us to further contact you, and that we will treat any data that you will provide according to the best ethical standards in the social science.

We are very grateful for your collaboration. This research could not happen without you!