Analysing Digital Interaction
Ethics and Practices for Online Research
Last spring I interviewed Wyke Stommel about an article she co-authored an important article: "Ethical approval: none sought. How discourse analysts report ethical issues around publicly available online data." You can find that interview and related resources here: Research Ethics & Extant Data. When I saw that she was a co-editor on a new book related to online research, I wanted to learn more.
There are very few books that deal deeply and specifically on the ethical dilemmas associated with studies of online communication. The book investigates interaction-focused scholarship on online communication and addresses ethical, methodological and theoretical issues of analysing online social interaction. Learn more in this interview with Dr. Stommel and co-editor Dr. Giles.
Decolonizing research methods means rethinking how we look at participants and problems. In the digital world there are even more ways the European West exerts cultural, economic, and political control. At the same time, the digital world allows researchers to conduct studies across the distances.
Storytelling has been a part of our shared life since the beginning of time. Story-based research approaches are especially valuable when studying sensitive issues or collecting data with vulnerable participants. In today’s digital world we have new ways to share and collect stories in a research context.
Hashtags offer online researchers ways to identify popular topics, trace viral messages, and locate influential thought leaders. Learn more about how researchers use hashtags with this multidisciplinary collection of open access articles.
From the moment social media platforms began to welcome user-generated content, researchers have looked for ways to study it. Learn more with open-access articles about social media platforms.
Qualitative researchers often collect very personal data, whether in interviews or in narratives, diaries, or other records that depict their experiences. One way to protect their identities is by changing their names, and anonymizing the data.
How can you use data science in social science research? Find an interview with the Oxford Internet Institute’s Dr. Bernie Hogan and lots of useful resources in this post.
Learn about connecting the unit of analysis with the qualitative methodology.
These difficult times present challenges for researchers. Find five original posts by Robert Kozinets about using Netnography to study sensitive topics.
Jessica Lester and Trena Paulus co-edited a December 2023 special issue for the Sage journal, Qualitative Inquiry, “Qualitative inquiry in the 20/20s: Exploring methodological consequences of digital research workflows.” Read the articles and watch a roundtable with contributors. This is the second of two discussions of the special issue.
Do you think about research questions as an insider, outsider, or somewhere in between? Why is positionality important in online research?