Qualitative Data Analysis : An Introduction (9781446289822) by Grbich Carol

Author:Grbich, Carol
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446289822
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc
Published: 2013-09-24T16:00:00+00:00

For the first group the online community provided much-needed support and was a retreat – a virtual community where they felt protected and safe – and for this group issues of privacy and secrecy dominated their concerns re the research. For the second group personal contacts, friendships, information, and affirmation were the dominant gains sought from membership. Concerns regarding privacy were minimal and public debate was encouraged. De Koster suggests that online forums provide spaces for Goffman’s (1959) ‘backstage performances’ where stigma can be revealed, covert skills developed, and support and advice given and received.

Member: mixed methods Micheala Fay (2007) used qualitative and survey methods to undertake internet research on a website of feminist academics, in which she herself was a legitimate participant, to investigate the concept of ‘home belonging’ and its fit in contemporary mobile lives. She gained permission from the group and undertook textual thematic analysis gained from total immersion in the group, sent out a structured survey questionnaire analysed via descriptive statistics, and kept notes of her own critically reflective involvement in the forum as well as undertaking two face-to-face interviews. For both Fay and de Koster access to the site and to data was facilitated by membership.

Member: on a site for teenagers The position of being a member has its own dilemmas, particularly when the users may well be under age for giving consent to participate in research. Heather Battles (2010) was a member of a public Message Board site aimed at American, Australia and Canadian female adolescents for discussions about the human papilloma virus (HPV) vaccine. This public site carried warnings that privacy was not possible so personal information should be restricted. She could have posted an open message to all participants so that individuals could withdraw or seek deletion of their comments, but she thought this might open the website to unethical players. She could perhaps have gained individual adolescent and parental consent but this might have been very time-consuming and difficult so she chose to gain permission from the administrator and to email the 72 participants to inform them about the study, giving concerned contributors the opportunity to withdraw their data. She chose to position herself as an unnamed member (pseudonym only) and she protected the site by not naming it and the contributors by not divulging names, user names nor using verbatim quotes that could identify the site or the users. Analysis of the 136 replies gained over a 3-month period was by limited manual coding to identify persistent threads.

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