Online Ethnographic Methods: Towards a Qualitative Understanding of Virtual Community Practices

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Author(s): Jörgen Skågeby (Linköping University, Sweden)
Copyright: 2011
Pages: 19
Source title: Handbook of Research on Methods and Techniques for Studying Virtual Communities: Paradigms and Phenomena
Source Author(s)/Editor(s): Ben Kei Daniel (University of Saskatchewan, Canada)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60960-040-2.ch025

Keywords: Information Science Reference / Media & Communications / Social Computing / Virtual Communities & Virtual Reality

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Abstract

This chapter describes the use of online ethnographical methods as a potent way to reach qualitative understanding of virtual communities. The term online ethnography envelopes document collection, online observation and online interviews. The chapter will explain the steps of conducting online ethnography – from defining setting and spelling out your research perspective, to collecting online data, analyzing gathered data, feeding back insights to the studied community and presenting results with ethical awareness. In this process the chapter will compare online ethnography to traditional ethnography and provide illustrative empirical examples and experiences from three recent online ethnographical studies on social information and media sharing (Skågeby, 2007, 2008, 2009a). While multimedial forms of data and data collection are becoming more common (i.e. video and sound recordings), the focus of the chapter lies mainly with text-based data. The chapter concludes by discussing methodological benefits and drawbacks of an online ethnographical process.

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Online Ethnographic Methods: Towards a Qualitative Understanding of Virtual Community Practices

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