CYBER PSYCHOLOGY. Online Research Methods and other Topics in Cyber psychology. (Essay Sample)

Online Research Methods and other Topics in Cyber psychology.
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Cyber psychology can be said to be the study on how humans interact with and around technology. This has helped us understand things like social media addiction and related low self-esteem. Big data refers to data whose size is beyond the ability of a typical software to extract, store, manage and analyze .It has attracted interest from a number of players who take this data and study it to gain insights and come up with trends on what has been happening over time. In psychology, it has started to chip in on areas such as social media, depression, behavior change, mental health, use of substances and even behavioral genetics. Fawcett (2016) discusses the analysis of what is called the quantified self in which individuals collect data on themselves I. e sleep patterns and number of steps using personal trackers like phones. There has been a few recent and imminent efforts to demonstrate advances in psychological insight realized by the big data generated by popular digital platforms like Facebook and twitter.
Real time analysis of data can considered a strong hold of big data in cyber psychology (Song, 2017). Normally, big data is analyzed and fetched at specific intervals but in real time big data analytics collect and analyze data constantly. This allows researchers to develop more effective strategies and data collected can be used to make decisions. Also it helps them to collect data from users in a manner that is invisible to them because it due not require their time or energy and hence reducing self-reporting bugs. On the other hand, the limitations are described using three dimensions i.e. volume, velocity and variety. Volume stands for data whose size may lead to issues with storage and analysis. Velocity on the other hand refers to data that come in at a high rate and are processed within a short time. Finally, variety is used refer to data which consists of many types, mainly unstructured.