Irriterat deltagande: att använda virtuella fokusgrupper för att studera politisk mobilisering i sociala nätverk.

In English The paper is in part an evaluation of using virtual focus groups in existing commercial platforms as a research method, in part a pilot study on motives and perceptions of Facebook users concerning political participation in social media. Two focus groups were set up in the commercial social network Facebook, consisting each of six participants, all of them residing in Sweden. One of the groups consisted of politically active people, the other group of politically inactive people. The method evaluation finds that virtual foccus groups is a useful and cost-effective method in obtaining data, but that commercial platforms should be chosen carefully. The pilot study shows that the relationship of the recruiting sender is as important as the political content when facebook users decide whether to participate by joining a group or a cause, at least for the participants in this study.