Tools > Screen Tracking
Screen Tracking
Screen tracking allows researchers to see what happens on their respondents’ screens and learn more about individual experiences on social media platforms. Regardless of whether you are researching the content of news feeds or the way people interact with different types of visual information, screen tracking provides an opportunity to investigate how platforms structure content and deliver it according to personal preferences.
It is a powerful method that allows for working with individual participants. It captures the specific content on platforms, including but not limited to TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube.
- Study Design & Ethics ApprovalA researcher designs a study, obtains ethics approval, and is registered with the AIO system to receive credentials for participant registration and data collection.
- Participant App InstallationUsing the researcher's credentials, respondents download, install and configure the app (Android only), granting necessary screen recording permissions.
- Automatic Screen CaptureThe app runs in the background, activating when a target app (e.g., Facebook) is opened. A pre-trained vision model captures only study-relevant content, ignoring personal posts and messages.
- Secure Data ProcessingOnce the session is complete, the collected video snippets are transferred to the cloud, where data is extracted, categorised, and sorted into a standardised dataset.
- Final Consent & AccessThe participant reviews the final, processed dataset and provides explicit consent to share it with the researcher, who can then access it for analysis.
How does screen tracking work?
Why use screen tracking?
As a tool, screen tracking allows researchers to capture personalised, curated social media feeds that are shaped by the black box algorithms of platforms. Looking at these feeds through the eyes of the respondent is a reliable way to understand how platforms function and study the real user experience within native environments. Furthermore, the method facilitates access to closed and visually-driven platforms where traditional data collection methods fail. The data collected is not just text; it is pictures, reels, and ads that provide context for qualitative, quantitative, or mixed-methods analyses.
What research does screen tracking support?
Screen tracking has been used by ADM+S and affiliated projects, some of which are described as case studies on the Ad Observatory page. The method has been used to explore the kinds of gambling and alcohol advertisements young people are exposed to and assess the content of ads during elections. The app can also be leveraged to understand how misinformation can be visually spread through recommendation algorithms, what trends are popular within online communities, and monitor platforms’ policy compliance in terms of content moderation.
Contact Us
Screen tracking can be used to identify content relevant to a specific study. It maintains cross-platform capability and provides ethical access to data. If you want to learn more about this method or have a project that can potentially benefit from this form of data donation, please contact us.