Doing Research In and On the Digital

Research Methods across Fields of Inquiry

Cristina Costa, Jenna Condie, Cristina Costa, Jenna Condie

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138673915
• eBook ISBN: 9781317201908
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

As a social space, the web provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the 'digital' has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how, where and, why to conduct social research.

Doing Research In and On the Digital aims to deliver on two fronts: first, by detailing how researchers are devising and applying innovative research methods for and within the digital sphere, and, secondly, by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied and encountered in such approaches.

In two core Parts, this collection explores:

• content collection: methods for harvesting digital data
• engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories.

With contributions from a diverse range of fields such as anthropology, sociology, education, healthcare and psychology, this volume will particularly appeal to post-graduate students and early career researchers who are navigating through new terrain in their digital-mediated research endeavours.

1 Doing research in and on the digital

Cristina Costa and Jenna Condie

The web, as a social space, provides researchers both with a tool and an environment to explore the intricacies of everyday life. As a site of mediated interactions and interrelationships, the digital world has evolved from being a space of information to a space of creation, thus providing new opportunities regarding how and where to conduct research. This emergence of the digital web as a participatory platform provides citizens with a stage where they can play out aspects of their (social, professional, political, and even private) lives as a variant, complement and/or extension of their social existence. Online representations of daily life can in this way result in rich storylines; accounts of mediated experiences and events that are worth studying as a phenomenon of our contemporary society. In this vein, the digital world is ultimately transformed into an interactive memory container where participatory content becomes research data and digital users become research participants.

It should then be no surprise that digital research methods are gaining prominence among researchers across different fields of inquiry. Researchers in the social and natural sciences, humanities and the professions alike are starting to employ digital tools for the collection of research data. Online surveys, for example, have become a mainstream practice in research while online interviews are increasingly more prominent given their affordances and affordability to reach research informants not only more easily and cheaply, but also in more dispersed locations. And although research on and within the digital world has become notoriously more abundant in the last few decades, given the opportunities enabled by the web, the majority of studies on digital phenomena still opt to employ more conventional research approaches, thus often creating a detachment from the tenets that compose the digital world as a space of knowledge creation and innovation.

Research on digital phenomena enables the development of digital research methods that go beyond the use of the web as a repository of data or a space where researchers tend to apply traditional forms of data collection. This is so because the emergence of the web as an alternative locus of participation and agency is blurring the boundaries of digital and physical spaces and, in so doing, it raises hard-to-answer ethical questions that steer less experienced researchers away from more advanced research approaches.

The objective of this book is to deliver on those two fronts by presenting examples of and reflection on how researchers across various fields are devising and applying innovative research methods when researching on and within the digital sphere and by discussing the ethical challenges and issues implied in such approaches.

Digital methods take on many different approaches, approaches which are not only related to the disciplinary tradition the researcher is associated with, but also intimately connected with the research phenomenon he/she is about to explore and the questions that are asked of it. As observed by Gubrium and Harper (2013), digital methods have more often than not become adaptations of traditional forms of inquiry than they have become participatory approaches. In this regard, the web is still predominantly regarded as a research tool rather than a research environment. This is an observation which we also have found through our own experience and observations as researchers, supervisors of postgraduate students and members of academic ethic committees. Just as in other areas of academic practice, there is an inclination to transfer to the digital world the practices that have marked one’s activity before the emergence of the web. This is a natural way of exploring the ‘new’ with the knowledge one brings to the field and which ultimately characterise researchers’ practices and experiences. However, with the expansion of the web to multiple communities and the widespread use of platforms that accommodate people’s interactions and generate user-driven data, new possibilities for research are constantly emerging online as a space of unhampered social interaction.

Collecting research data is a core activity of empirical research, and the web has, in this regard, contributed immensely to the enhancement of data collection instruments through the technological solutions it offers, thus translating techniques used prior to the advent of the web into its digital form. Thus is the classic case of surveys and questionnaires that can now be sent to a multitude of participants via a link or even interviews that can be conducted online using Voice over Internet Protocol (VOIP) or video solutions that are time- and cost-effective (Costa, 2013). Although some may argue that conducting online interviews may present challenges when considering the lack of physical presence or the deficiency of human expression, the critique is less fierce when associated with research instruments that require the entry of participant data. Online solutions to the collection of questionnaire data are rarely questioned these days, thus showing a smooth transition from paper to online solutions of such approaches. Yet, other possibilities have been opened through the developments of web and mobile applications that may or may not be designed with a research purpose in mind. This multitude of prospects can both delight and alarm researchers, given that such opportunities call for an experimental mind as to how research can be conducted within the novelty brought by the web. However, it also requires a robust epistemological and ontological approach, one that is followed by an ethical approach which more often than not challenges both the role and activity of the researcher, given the novelty of the experience. Even though the literature is not always straightforward about the potential and advantages of conducting, in particular, qualitative research with the support of the digital tools and on digital environments, there is an increasing need to explore the alternatives presented by the web, given the social phenomena that are therein unveiled and the opportunities it presents for wider research opportunities in times of research budgetary cuts.

Researchers have shown that since the advent of the web, especially since its read and write features have become mainstream, the digital world is ripe for research of a wide variety of phenomena and from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. No less important is the realisation that both online devices and environments, such as Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Tinder or Instagram, to name but a few, can be used both as tools of data collection and spaces of research participation. These are themes this book will explore. In other words, this book aims to provide examples and reflections of digital methods to work on and within the digital.

The structure of the book

One aim in editing this collection was to document the diversity of contexts in which digital methods are used and in which ways the digital serves as either a solution for data collection and/or engagement with research participants. The other key aim of the book was to contribute to ethical debates with critical perspectives anchored in practice, as a form of informing ethic committees and inspiring researchers to develop contemporary forms of doing research in light of a digital knowledge society. The book is organised into two distinctive Parts to accommodate the purpose mentioned above:

Part I Data collection: methods for harvesting digital data

Part II Engaging informants: digital participatory methods and data stories

The two Parts comprise chapters that explore digital research approaches from a range of methodological angles while also covering a wide variety of research areas, such as substance misuse, education, cancer research, or photoblogging practices, to name but a few. The research included in this collection has been selected with the purpose of providing the reader with as wide an understanding as possible of the application of digital methods in a wide range of contexts. Nonetheless, it should be noted that the list of topics by no means covers everything the ever-expanding digital field of inquiry includes, but rather should be regarded as an intellectual endeavour of conceptualising the ‘digital’ as both a tool and environment ripe for new research ventures. Furthermore, an objective of this book is to provide readers with examples that are useful across disciplines and which can be transferred and/or adapted to other fields of inquiry.

The chapters

From the discipline of Psychology, Kaye, Monk and Hamlin’s contribution (Chapter 2) focuses on smartphone-enabled research as an alternative methodology in psychological research that offers researchers the ability to conduct contextually aware and ecologically valid research in ‘real time’. The authors draw upon two research studies from quite different psychological fields: one study focuses on the assessment of alcohol consumption and related cognitions and behaviours, and the other focuses on digital gaming experiences. The two studies enable the authors to traverse a diverse range of issues, some of which are more pertinent to Psychology, such as acknowledging the importance of social context in human behaviour, but other issues can apply across fields. The authors consider how technology can be used effectively in the pursuit of knowledge across Psychology, including the potentials, pitfalls, practicalities and technicalities of conducting smartphone-enabled research.

In Chapter 3, Naomi Barnes takes us to the field of Education as she traces the methodological adaptions developed during a research project that takes Facebook status updates as research data. Using a phenomenography approach, the author sets out to explore first year students’ experience at university. In so doing, the chapter provides an incisive discussion regarding a new approach to scholarship, one that relies on the digital. The chapter discusses the selection of phenomenography as an appropriate methodology and reflects how phenomenography is a valuable tool for digital research while elaborating on the ontological, epistemological and ethical questions the researcher faced as part of the research process. As well as showing how to do phenomenography, Barnes points out its conceptual underpinnings to consider what phenomenography can do for digital forms of scholarship.

From an applied and clinical psychological setting, in Chapter 4, Dugdale, Elison-Davies, Davies, Ward, and Jones reflect on how the digital world is re-shaping the boundaries of traditional research methods by providing access to a wide range of data and affording a multitude of online data collection techniques. The authors go on to remind the reader that such technology-enhanced research methodologies, however, do not come without challenges, especially those regarding ethics. To illustrate their ethical considerations, the authors review a mixed-methods online study that investigated the use of online resources to support people in recovery from substance misuse as part of their psychosocial research. With digital research methods, the authors navigate the challenges of doing research with people in recovery from, or still using, substances, as admitting to substance-using behaviour can often incur legal implications.

Cathy Ure’s research in Chapter 5 explores breast cancer bloggers’ lived experiences of ‘survivorship’ and reflects on the ethical aspects of gaining access and analysing data available online. Breast cancer is a subject area that is generating significant online interest, but it is also an area of great sensitivity and subjectivity. The author explores this aspect through an inductive and reflexive approach to the research presented in the chapter, but not without addressing the ethical issues that emerged from such a research experience. Reflexive ethical approaches require researchers to consider and revise their role as part of the research process on a continuous basis. The author goes on to reflect on the challenges posed by the ‘digital’, including considerations of what ‘informed consent’ is and means in the digital era. She also ponders on the epistemological implications of undertaking a discursive analysis of blogs and how participants might feel about the research interpretations and findings. The chapter finishes with a reflection on the nature of online data regarding its open accessibility to a wider audience and how it should not necessarily be regarded as publicly available data for research purposes. Ure’s decision to ask bloggers for their informed consent resulted in her data corpus consisting of content from one blogger who also requested ‘proper credit’ for the use of her blogged texts in research. From this chapter, we can see how ethical and responsible behaviour by the researcher can always be observed, even if that presents complications and challenges for the data sample.

Into the realm of Digital Humanities and continuing the epistemological and methodological considerations around discursive approaches but on a larger scale, Chapter 6 explores text mining research on online platforms. Using a case study focused on contemporary online forms of travel writing, Tom Van Nuenen discusses basic heuristic steps for explorative and unsupervised computational text research in current online environments, which he designates as a form of ‘corpus-assisted discourse studies’. In so doing, he examines several methods of gathering, preparing, sorting and analysing online data and offers suggestions for the vacillation between so-called ‘distant’ and ‘close’ reading strategies. He concludes that digital methods allow researchers many avenues of insight, and that different data sortings and representations allow different epistemological approaches. The chapter concludes with some important reflections on the relationship between Digital Humanities and the broader Humanities and the contributions that Digital Humanities has to offer, that go beyond digital research tools to the scholarly questions these tools present to researchers.

Continuing the theme of travel, Chapter 7 explores how researchers can get closer to the phenomenon of location-aware technologies and move towards a conceptual position that understands humans and technology as inherently entangled with one another. Condie, Lean and James reflect and diffract upon their research on the use of location-aware social apps such as Tinder, by critically examining their research questions, how they have evolved and are evolving through their personal experiences of ‘swiping right’ into their research fields and through their engagement in new materialist scholarship. One contribution of this chapter is to highlight the challenges of resisting binary constructs such as human/non-human, subject/object, online/offline, and digital/material within research on digital phenomena. Their research focus on travel also brings to the fore how humans, technologies and place are inseparable and how knowledge and experience are always situated somewhere. Entering the research field has changed to using the phone in the researcher’s hand, which can be included in the assemblages of research and knowledge production for responsible digital scholarship.

Chapter 8 offers a meaningful insight into the remote ethnography practices made possible by digital technologies. Shireen Walton provides us with a contribution from digital anthropology while using a technology-linked visual research approach. Engaging Iranian photobloggers as research participants, the author discusses how visual methods can be applied and developed to ask specific research questions, especially in cases where access to the site of inquiry is limited, as is the case of her study-example on Iran at a particular period of political and diplomatic unpredictability. Furthermore, Walton shows that a digital presence can be as effective in her research role of ethnographer. Finally, she suggests that digital and virtual ethnographic methods can raise a host of epistemological, ontological and ethical questions concerning how qualitative digital researchers ‘be in’, mediate and represent an increasingly interconnected world.

Part II of the book changes focus to consider more engaged and participatory research practices. We start with Ellis and Merdian’s chapter (Chapter 9) on the visualisation of research data in the contexts of digital research dissemination. The authors also consider their approach to the collection, management and analysis of very large data sets as well as the observation of ethical research practices alongside secure data ownership. More concretely, the chapter constitutes a response to the increased digitalisation of research, especially within psychology and across the social sciences. It argues that digital research methods have the potential to revolutionise data management across disciplines, but that fact has so far failed to be recognised and/or implemented by the research community. The chapter also aims to highlight a way towards an improved research toolset for the psychological community and help improve access to future research for both their psychological peers and interested members of the public.

Bui’s work (Chapter 10) provides reflections on a project involving a human-centred design research approach. It describes the redesign of a digital platform (iSeeChange) that combines two types (quantitative and qualitative) and scales (global and local) of climate data, data that is user-driven. The author takes the reader through the design process which reveals meaningful insights regarding how researchers situate both the digital tools and the design process itself within social research. The human-centred design approach bears resemblance to certain aspects of participatory action research approaches by placing emphasis on the generation and collection of collaborative data with the community being studied. Such approaches raise questions of transparency towards research participants. The chapter concludes that participatory approaches in the design of social research have the potential to lead to meaningful interactions between designers and researchers, and target audiences and communities on which the research is focu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Doing research in and on the digital
• PART I: Collecting content: methods for harvesting digital data
• PART II: Engaging research informants: digital participatory methods and data stories
• Index