Qualitative Research in Digital Environments

A Research Toolkit

Alessandro Caliandro, Alessandro Gandini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317282181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Études marketing

This book offers a toolkit of methods and technologies to undertake qualitative research on digital spaces. Unlike commonly used traditional methodological strategies, which are 'retrofitted' to digital spaces, Qualitative Research in Digital Environments offers researchers a set of 'digitally native' tools that are designed for online social environments.

Thanks to a broad range of cases including Louis Vuitton, YouTube and the concept of 'hipsterism', this text illustrates the practical applications of techniques and tools over the most popular social media environments.

This book will be a valuable guide to qualitative research for marketing students, researchers and practitioners, as well as a central reference point for tutors in the growing field of Digital Sociology.

Section I

Introduction

The overarching scope of Qualitative Research in Digital Environments: A Research Toolkit is to provide researchers who want to study digital environments across a variety of disciplines, from marketing to the social sciences and digital media, with some basic concepts and techniques that can be used to detect, collect, organise, analyse and interpret digital data. Specifically, the book is a theoretical and practical toolkit for doing qualitative research on social media environments, such as blogs and online forums, as well as social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube.

With this work, we aim to offer a pivotal resource for the study of cultural practices and meanings across online social networks and platforms. Building on the grounds of ‘digital methods’ and especially the principle of follow the medium (Rogers, 2013), our approach aims to represent a valuable methodological guideline that supports the understanding of complex socio-cultural contexts that are populated by dispersed, fluid and dynamic social formations – and to also be useful for multidisciplinary purposes. Think about how important it is for marketing, digital PR and advertising professionals to research and interpret the opinions and cultures of their customers and target audiences online – for instance, as consumers/users interact across Facebook pages, or flood Twitter feeds with opinions about a certain product or brand. Imagine how important it is for anthropologists and sociologists who study cultures and social dynamics to observe relevant aspects of our social and cultural lives – such as political opinion, social movements or work – as many of these phenomena today originate or develop across online spaces. This is a limited but significant range of the many applications that digital media research can have.

Our contribution aims to be a complement to the various methodological approaches that can be adopted to the study of a multidimensional context that is approached from various, and sometimes very different, perspectives. In this book we build on a unique range of case studies that illustrate the practical applications of techniques and tools of data collection, analysis andinterpretation – a set of resources that we used in our daily research practice at the Centre for Digital Ethnography, based at the University of Milan. Case studies include work on collaborative peer production, teen fandom, hipster cultures, consumer and brand-oriented research, just to name a few. This wide variety of examples will support the claim that a coherent methodological framework for the qualitative study of online environments can be adopted fruitfully in many contexts, and hopefully will come to represent an action plan on how to conduct research on the digital realm from a qualitative point of view for fellow researchers in their own fields.

We believe that a contribution like ours is much needed in the contemporary landscape of digital research – which, in its current stage, is still arguably a ‘science in the making’. Digital methods research is an exciting, growing and incredibly lively field that involves a community of scholars from various disciplines who engage and debate, agree and disagree on how to deal with the monstrous amount of data produced by the activity of users on the Internet, how to engage with the astonishing insights and potential the Internet offers for the study of its own functioning, and how to make sense of the social and cultural principles that characterise online interaction. Yet, digital research is also an eminently contradictory practice, one that challenges the usual dichotomy that separates qualitative and quantitative research (Goertz and Mahoney, 2012) as it employs a range of various, and sometimes incoherent, methodological principles – often, rushing to ‘get the data’ without really knowing why or what to do with it.

Researching social media: the methodological debate

In order to see how challenging this distinction can be, we may start from a basic epistemological difference. To put it extremely simply, it may be said that a quantitative approach tends to focus on so-called Big Data (boyd and Crawford, 2012). Essentially, this consists in the collection and management of huge quantities of digital information, using algorithms and dedicated software to automatically analyse such data, and elaborate statistical models that enable the interpretation of social phenomena and identification of underlying trends. Common research questions that can be addressed via such quantitative, Big Data approaches are, for instance: “To what extent can Twitter data predict political disaffection?” (Monti, et al., 2013), or, “To what extent can Wikipedia articles about movies predict box-office success? (Mestyan, Yasseri and Kertész, 2013), or, “To what extent can Instagram selfies account for the diffusion of narcissism in contemporary societies?” (Tifentale and Manovich, 2015).

A qualitative approach, by contrast, tends to focus on ‘small data’, which may be described as small-to-medium-sized sets of digital data, sometimes generated by a single user (Veinot, 2007). The use of small data allows researchers to focus on the socio-cultural meanings that digital media users assign to their actions and the content they produce, as well as on the practices and cultures of interactions among users. Typically, a qualitative digital inquiry aims at describing and understanding how users use digital data, devices and affordances to perform their self-presentation strategies (Marwick, 2015) or how users participate in the co-construction of socio-cultural formations such as online communities or publics (Bruns and Burgess, 2015; Papacharissi, 2011) within a given context.

This book, as the title illustrates, focuses chiefly on the qualitative approach. This is essentially due to two main reasons. A first and basic one is that we normally use a qualitative approach in our own empirical research projects; as such, we have developed an epistemological and empirical set of principles that we have widely experimented with and rehearsed. Second, and most importantly, we think that the adoption of a qualitative approach focused on small data is more viable and simpler for beginners to use when approaching digital research. Small data, in general terms, are normally easier to collect and handle, but nevertheless can offer equally insightful results as those obtained using Big Data research, depending on the specific research question. As with the usual methodological traditions of qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences, the adoption of these approaches to digital research can lead to meaningfully different, but also complementary results.

However, the distinction between Big Data and small data, and between qualitative and quantitative methods, in digital research is a challenging one. In fact, these categories must be taken as conventional and merely analytical constructs. We maintain that these terms are conceptual artefacts that we use here simply to enable the reader to better understand the qualitative approach proposed in this book. Within emerging research sub-fields such as Digital Sociology, Digital Humanities and Digital Research Methods, it is often difficult to neatly distinguish between ‘big’ and ‘small’ data, or to employ strictly quantitative or qualitative methods. From an empirical point of view, these two dimensions effectively prove to be deeply intertwined – and increasingly will be. Often, for instance, the adoption of an analytical focus that makes use of small data comes as a result of processing Big Data sampling. Similarly, Big Data analysis often takes advantage of small samples of data, upon which human analysts perform manual tasks with the purpose of preliminarily exploring huge datasets and making sense of them (Ford, 2014). Finally, both big and small data analysis often deals with digital text broadly considered, such as Instagram photos or Twitter messages. This kind of ‘measurable content’ has an intimately hybrid nature, such that it proves difficult to classify the unit of analysis in a way that it clearly resolves into a quantitative or qualitative approach. For instance, think about the uses of hashtags on Twitter; these can be submitted to quantitative content analysis by counting frequencies or co-occurrences, but at the same time they may constitute the unit of analysis for a qualitative study that points at the identification of a collective cultural discourse that could be mapped, navigated and submitted to qualitative content analysis (Marres and Gerlitz, 2015). What makes the difference is the epistemological principle, and the question or topic the researcher is investigating.

Digital methods for cultural processes

In order to provide the reader with a toolkit to conduct qualitative research in digital environments, we build on the Digital Methods paradigm (Rogers, 2013; see Chapter 3). This paradigm is taken here as the main interpretative framework for investigating the structure of social media environments and understanding the cultural processes that arise within them. These ‘cultural processes’ comprise the set of interactions between users and digital devices, and among users themselves, whereby shared systems of symbols, values, opinions, points of view and identities are brought into existence (Hallinan and Striphas, 2014). Specifically, we will use Digital Methods in conjunction with a qualitative and interpretative framework, and show how this approach could be effectively applied to the study of crucial phenomena within contemporary digital society, such as consumer cultures, fan cultures, political cultures, digital work and peer-to-peer production.

To this purpose, the wide range of case studies that derive from our everyday activities as social researchers, as well as from our experience as marketing consultants, will be used to showcase practical applications of how online users interact with, and manipulate, digital devices and environments, to produce what we will identify as ‘shared cultural imaginaries’, within which specific strategies of self-presentation and specific types of social formations can be found. In so doing, this book is designed to be a particularly useful resource for qualitative researchers interested in consumer culture and media studies in a broad sense, such as sociologists, anthropologists, marketing scholars and practitioners engaged in professional research work. All of them have to cope with social media environments when conducting their research projects, increasingly needing to analyse digital-based data sources from a qualitative perspective.

Take ethnographers, for example: in our contemporary societies, marked by high geographical mobility, ethnographers are more and more pushed to perform what is known as multi-sited ethnography (Marcus, 1995); that is, to follow participants across their movements in space. As a result, it is likely that ethnographers come across digital environments and social media in particular, since social actors nowadays spend a significant part of their everyday life within them. That is exactly what occurred to us while working on a project that required us to ethnographically explore a number of peer-to-peer communities located in different cities across Europe.¹ As we designed the research strategy for the project, we quickly realised that it was almost impossible to simply conduct a standard ethnographic inquiry within these communities, given that their members do not share a privileged and fixed site or field in their convening and interacting practices. Actually, thanks to preliminary explorations we observed how members of these communities continually shifted from physical environments (such as official headquarters and public events) to digital environments (such as virtual communities situated on internal mailing lists or social media platform like blogs, Twitter and Facebook) – and vice versa. Therefore, we had no choice but to equip ourselves with a methodological strategy that could allow us to follow our participants across both offline and online environments.

Given the complexity of the relationships between the offline and online field in contemporary research, and the continuous shifting that takes place between these environments, ethnographers are required to treat the digital environment in a much more dynamic way. They could approach it, for instance, as a point of departure and of arrival for their inquiries (Hine, 2015), or as a field for the study of both the socio-cultural contexts where social actors live and the specific activities they engage in, which are shaped and affected by such contexts (Marwick, 2013; Marwick and boyd, 2011). This applies to a variety of topics. If, for example, an ethnographer wants to study the phenomenon of teenage fandom for the band One Direction, as one of the authors did (Arvidsson, et al., 2015), s/he can easily and fruitfully use a digital environment such as Twitter as the main field site. This stands out as a privileged context for a) the identification of influential members in the public, who can then be interviewed offline, in order to delve into the study of micro-celebrity practice; b)...