Research Methods and Global Online Communities

A Case Study

Alexia Maddox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317065647
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book brings into focus the technologically augmented nature of global online communities, advancing research methods that reveal the imprint of emergent social forms and characterise digital frontiers of social engagement. Drawing on insights from across the social sciences, it presents a case study of people with passions for reptiles and amphibians to illustrate for next generation researchers how to conduct community research in the real world. Richly illustrated with ethnographic research, together with extensive survey and interview material drawn from around the world, Research Methods and Global Online Communities explores the changing nature of communities that form around common interests and are embedded in a digital architecture rather than place. In doing so, this book transcends the digital dualism of online/offline models of community and engages with debates on the social impacts of the internet and the adaptive nature of community. As such, it will appeal to social scientists interested in innovative approaches to characterising digital communities through mixed-methods research practice.

Chapter 1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315605562-1

This chapter aims to provide context for the study of digital community, introducing the major themes that are subsequently addressed in this book.

Section 1.1 provides an introduction to the key ideas evident in the literature that may assist the researcher in identifying the signature of digital community within research practice. It also introduces a series of definitional discussions of these key ideas in order to situate and anchor the reader through some of the more technical language used to describe the conceptualisation of individual agency and structural influences within a digital community. Section 1.2 provides an overview of the book structure, beginning with a discussion of the conceptual understandings of community reviewed in Part I and introducing how the case study of the herper community will be utilised to provide the research practitioner with practical directions and examples of these concepts in action within research practice in Part II. Section 1.3 briefly introduces the community case study and starts the personal narrative of my research experience and how I employed these ideas to a real world community that defied the cosy glow that ideas of solidarity and support usually evoke.

From the outset, a key understanding that directs the discussion of community within these pages is that, theoretically, it is both a social and spatial concept; with the definitional discussion of this idea splitting community concepts into a discussion of place or different modes of sociability. Notwithstanding, this understanding of how to present a community study is often unrelated to our intentions to characterise and investigate a community. As researchers, we may be looking for evidence of collective engagement and activism that leads to social change. On the other hand, we may be looking at community as a stable social form that provides a sense of connectedness, support, security, identity and meaning, all facilitating wellbeing for the individual. Either way, these perspectives into the mechanisms of social change or stability and security speak to our understanding of community as a foundation of social organisation. It is the mediating link between the individual and society and is consequently the engine room of social theory and research practice.

1.1 Searching the Research Literature for Signatures of Digital Community

In the exploration of scholarly perspectives into the imbrication of community structures and process with the Internet, I was prompted to the questions of whether people are able to connect in with each other and whether they could generate a shared identity within and across the online-offline social contexts. This question stemmed from the key concern of community studies, mechanisms of social cohesion and the intellectual concern for increased social alienation and disconnection wrought by the digital environment. As a researcher, I wondered exactly how trust and reciprocity plays out across the technologically augmented and spatially distributed community context, in which some people knew each other before connecting online and others did not. I also had to consider whether, when looking at a community whose membership was choice-driven and much social interaction was technologically mediated, I was going to be able to find instances of exchange in social support, access to desired opportunities and locations and information sharing. These elements, essential components of social cohesion and continuity, were drawn out and operationalised in the literature discussing social capital. This positioned social capital indicators as effective indicators of a community and suggested that I needed to find evidence for them in order to argue that I was actually looking at cohesive community experience. These concerns for and of social connection online did not exist within traditional approaches to community studies because, by default, strangers were not a part of the community and trust and reciprocity was often built within the context of co-location, a lack of choice in membership and in the face of strong social repercussions and limited social mobility (socially, spatially and economically). In response to this knowledge vacuum and the race of technological innovation, a nascent body of literature considering the social impact of the Internet sprung up in the 1990s and matured over the course of 20 years. For me, in reconciling community studies with the bodies of Internet research that had galloped rampantly from the gate with few moments of reflection and integration, I had many questions for how to enact and investigate these insights within a real life community.

An overarching concern amongst scholars and public intellectuals in the domain of Internet research was whether connecting with people online led to, or indicated, disconnection with people in real life (IRL). The dimensions and influence of this discussion can be found within the research literature through a preoccupation with the easy disconnect inherent to online membership, the development of trust online and the weakening of reciprocity within communities and society more generally. This concern manifested its greatest polarities in perspective through the approach of observing social action within the online and offline domains as distinct, both spatially and socially. The early debates about the social implications of the Internet (DiMaggio et al., 2001) resonated with Georg Simmel’s despair for increasing industrialisation (and its correlate of an urbanised society) as enhancing social alienation. Through the theoretical polarisation of the digital and physical interaction, this argument was seeded into the technological infrastructure of the Network Society (Manuel Castells, 1996). While much about this approach is self-evident, there are differences in how we interact online versus in-person, the implications for polarising social experience through digital behaviours and place-based interactions amplified the debate around whether mediated sociability facilitated in-person social alienation (Nie, Hillygus, & Erbring, 2002) or increased wider social connection (Rheingold, 2000). This concern about infrastructural changes ‘causing’ social dysfunction or its mirror, increasing cohesion, is a long held preoccupation of studies of society and is evident in contemporary discussions of disruptive technologies.

Given the complexity of these debates, I would like to pause and take time to clarify my choices in selecting from the different discourses and their accompanying technical vocabulary, that the reader will come across in this work, that are used to describe the experience of community in its virtual and physical incarnations. Terms we have met so far include digital community, online and offline community and IRL (in real life) or physical community and virtual community. The reader of Internet studies will also come across discussions of computer-mediated communication (CMC) from the field of human-computer interactions (HCI) (Bagozzi & Dholakia, 2002; Jacobson, 1999; Morkes, Kernal, & Nass, 1999; Walther, 1995, 1996, 1997; Walther, Anderson, & Park, 1994; Walther, Loh, & Granka, 2005). This was language often used in early research exploring social interaction online and comes from a Computer Sciences perspective. Mediated sociality or mediated sociability is terminology more commonly used in contemporary works within sociological or psychological discourses. In discussing this terminology, I will focus initially on the choice of language (and discourse) for discussing technologically enabled interactions and then move on to clarifying the language used for a community that incorporates this. The use of communications technologies as the media through which non-placed based social interaction occurs characterised interaction through presence and absence of people rather than through spatial proximity. This approach of viewing interaction as 24/7 access and ‘always on’ technologies has further evolved through scholarly understandings in the HCI field of the mobility of personal computing devices and the increasing ubiquity of passive computing through which real-time behavioural, indirect or sensory interactions can occur. In this research, I will refer to these ideas through the notion of mediated sociability, following the work of scholars connecting ideas of online interactions with relational forms of analysis (Anderson & Jack, 2002; Comunello, 2012; Foth & Hearn, 2007; Hampton, 1998; Hardey, 2002; Hardey, 2007; Matzat, 2010; G. S. Mesch & Talmud, 2010; Nie, 2001; Wellman & Gulia, 1995; Wellman & Haythornthwaite, 2002; Wellman, Quan Haase, Witte, & Hampton, 2001). This approach prioritises the perspective of person-to-person (or avatar-to-avatar) interactions or social behaviour rather than that of interacting with (and through) the device.

The communal correlate of capturing mediated sociability within the boundaries and culture of a social form, can be found in discussions of digital, virtual and online communities. The caveat is that these ideas do not represent one and the same construct. Just as with the language for mediate sociability takes us down slightly different conceptual pathways, so do the difference conceptualisations of community in cyberspace. Virtual community and physical community are paired as oppositional constructs within the literature. Physical community is best understood through the traditional community studies of the Chicago School in which a neighbourhood or ethnically homogeneous immigrant community is studied. This is a particularly located and embodied understanding of community. On the other hand, a virtual community is often represented as a social simulation because it is not embodied and occurs in a specific location online. An example of this would be ‘Second Life’, even the name of which implies that engagement with others online is not your real (IRL) or ‘first’ life. Consequently, a virtual community occurs solely online, within a specific software environment and is characterised by its mediation of social connection through the Internet. Virtual community studies proliferated from the early 90s onwards. They are an example of the first flush of researching life online and, I would argue, can be seen as a novelty stream of research springing out of a reaction to the physical located-ness and geography of social life and community practice that preceded this.

In contrast to this, offline community was developed conceptually at a later period as a consort to the idea of an online community. This differs from the virtual-physical pairing, as the idea of an ‘offline’ community does not preexist the idea of an ‘online’ community. Again, these represent community in physical space and community in virtual or cyber-space, but speak more specifically to ideas of the co-location of embodied social interaction (inperson) in opposition to the presence-absence dynamic of co-presence in the online environment (disembodied). While the online community is seen as disembodied, it has theoretically been used to discuss the nature of mediated sociability and co-presence rather than to present the location of community as polarised between the cyber and physical geographies. A digital community, a consequent idea stemming from the argument of this book, is a notion through which community can be characterised by both its virtual and physical attributes.

These definitions, and their differences, have implications for research methodology. The clarity surrounding their use will be key for the reader in following the evolution of ideas and their methodological implications presented in this book. This connects to the aim of this book to rethink how to identify the characteristics of a community both methodologically and theoretically and act as a bridge to introduce scholars into the contemporary study of communities. Consequently, the intention of the ideas presented here are to contribute to the discourse surrounding the nature of online communities. A central tenant of this book is that the Internet is now embedded across and interlaces most domains of contemporary social experience. However the issues of social life being a combination of online and offline actions, and the premise that contemporary social systems are not defined by a single time and place, seems to bely the possibility that these elements can be leveraged to identify a community for study.

1.2 Navigating the Structure of the Book

The book is structured in two parts, with Part I (Chapters 2 through 6) positioning the conceptualisation of community through an environmental approach and Part II (Chapters 7 through 10) presenting examples from the herper community case study on how these ideas are enacted as a research methodology, from design and data collection to data analysis and research reporting. To this end, each chapter presented in Part I replaces our understandings of the conceptual and methodological approaches available to the community researcher. Chapter 2, presents a discussion of the connections evident in the research literature between community studies and research into the social adoption and appropriation of communication technologies. The connections between research into place-based community and mediated sociability presented in this discussion leads the reader through debates surrounding the characterisation and construction of place within the community context and the social composition of groups online. Through this discussion, we come to a particular focus upon the impacts of the Internet upon patterns of social organisation, of which community is a primary form.

Chapter 3 introduces the theoretical foundations for the methodological approach I followed in my own community study. Consideration of the literature on mediated sociability led to the understanding that community depicted either through its physical or virtual aspects, diminished my capacity to present the full story of community experience in a digital age. Why did I have to take one view or the other, I wondered, when these elements were plainly integrated into the everyday life experience of my participants? Consequently, I take the reader through consecutive questions, ‘How did online community studies develop?’ and ‘Who is doing what in the field right now?’ This approach brings the literature reviewing online sociability and CMC, that emerged almost as a separate stream of research, in dialogue with the pre-occupations of community studies; these being in characterising place, composition, boundaries and mechanisms of cohesion within a group. In Chapter 3, I discuss research and approaches that reconcile this divergence through investigating a stream of research literature into ecological forms, such as media ecologies, the information ecology of a library and the communicative ecology of an apartment complex, that led to the conceptual development of a social ecology to describe a community structure that is globally distributed and technologically mediated. This conceptual toolkit leads into a discussion of a research methodology that has the capacity to collect data and integrate insight across the online and offline environments of a community (Chapter 4). With this scene set, and the tools for research practice on the table, Chapters 5 and 6 takes the reader into the world of people with reptile and amphibian interests and discusses the sensitisation of the methodology to a community under study. These chapters discuss how these tools were refined for application within a heaving and evolving community space that through its function and process dispensed with a dualistic explanation of social action and community experience.

In Part II of the book, Chapters 7 through to 10, I use the methods and findings of the herper community case study to illustrate for the reader how community place, composition, boundaries and cohesion were identified through this research practice. To do this, I review the techniques and research findings that articulate the technological and social layers of the community with its mediating culture. The second half of the book is consequently the meeting and merging of two paradigms; with the four elements of community characterisation of place, composition, boundaries and cohesion presented in each consecutive chapter. Within each of these consecutive chapters, I present the community domain through its dialogue with the three elements used to identify the social ecology of the community, the technical and social layers and the mediating culture. This approach speaks to the emergent and dynamic nature of community that constructs itself across a digital context, rather than being anchored to a single location, such as a neighbourhood, or identifiable through social homogeneity, such as the early immigrant communities of the United States. In segmenting the presentation of the research findings and methods used across the technological layer, social layer and mediating culture of the community, we can see how the environmental imprint of a community can be generated through the lived experiences of its members. This approach reflects a desire not to define these elements through researcher definition and theoretical proxies prior to the conduct of a study, as has traditionally been the methodological practice within community studies. In the case of the open social structures of digital community, place, composition, boundaries and mechanisms of cohesion may not be known prior to the conduct of the research. As I sometimes joke, I had to complete my research in order to start it.

1.3 The Community Case Study

At this point, I hear you wondering about what kind of community would lend itself to this research approach? I had had exposure to the community of people with reptile and amphibian interests through a personal connection and...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• PART I THE STUDY OF GLOBAL ONLINE COMMUNITIES
• PART II ILLUSTRATING THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN RESEARCH METHODS, CONCEPTS AND ANALYSIS
• Bibliography
• Index