Data used in this analysis is accessable to public, but not the kind of ready-to-use data. I haven't find official API endpoints returning location information of a user, it only allow to get pictures taken at a sepcific location. Therefore, I need to scrape, clean and translate data before use it. For example, the time when each photo is token is in UNIX format and I need to transfer it to GMT and count the frequency of photo posts in a day/month for visualization.
The data is not complete even in terms of Instagram users, only 40% of renttherunway users and 25% of letote users disclose their location information in Instagram. I haven't made my visualization reflecting really time data due to limited skills and time I have, so it will be come incomplete quickly, but it does reflect the overall trend in last several years.
Meanwile, Instagram is only one of the digital scenarios where we conduct our ethnography work, so data from only one place is defintely not complete when we want to reveal user culture of entire fashion rental services. So the next step is to apply this method to other social media platforms.
The coherency of data is quite good, all the information scraped are quite standard and rational.
If we interpret the location as the residential location of a user, then some data might be incorrect. As we noticed, there are many photos posted outsides the US, so we need to combine qualitative research to understand these locations rather than relying on it.
Within the population of Instagram users, there is little sample bias. However, sampling from Instagram for the sake of undersdaning the whole user population has bias and we were clear about this even before we do this. For example, you tend to show off on Instagram when you are satisfy with the clothings and complain about it in facebook group when something goes wrong.
I collect our data from public post and have also collected the information of each user such as the link to that photo, the account name of the user, so we are good if we have any doubt on any location data and want to explore more one hte specific user who losted it.