Online naturalistic inquiry for stakeholder issue analysis: Design and implementation

Social media offers extensive reach and inclusive engagement potential for projects and stakeholders. Current studies document its use for project information dissemination, building project awareness and project stakeholder assessment. However, studies into the use of social media in project stakeholder engagement remains scant. To date, there is lack of theoretically based guidance for project stakeholder engagement via social media in a pragmatic sense. In this paper, we advocate social media as a useful platform for online naturalistic inquiry of stakeholder engagement and propose a methodology for the analysis of stakeholder issues via social media to enhance engagement. We combine netnography, thematic, emotion work, and sentiment analyses to demonstrate operationalisation of the methodology for stakeholder issue analysis in the context of infrastructure projects. In doing so, we outline steps to identify, analyse and prioritise stakeholder issues for infrastructure projects via social media and discuss its implications for research and practice. • Social media offers a naturally situated setting for project organizations to understand and prioritize stakeholder issues. • The study illustrates how thematic, sentiment and emotion analyses of social media data can be designed and operationalized. • The methodology, although applied in the context of infrastructure development, can be applied to projects in other domains.