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Preface
For over two decades, researchers have been grappling with online inquiry, including gaining access to spaces, communicating with participants, and obtaining informed consent. Before the advent of Web 2.0, online research primarily examined static, heavily text-based forms and spaces, such as email, chatrooms, and websites. Though studies of the primitive Internet often were focused on content analysis or involved offline methods to clarify online data, such as face-to-face individual interviews (Reid, 1994; Turkle, 1995), near the end of the twentieth century, online spaces began to gain recognition as vehicles for recruiting and communicating with participants (Gaiser, 1997). More recently, researchers have conducted a range of online studies of behavior and meaning making, from examinations of teamwork and leadership in massively multiplayer gaming to investigations of youth literacy and writing development through fanfiction (Chen, 2012; Lammers, 2012).
In this book, we acknowledge the evolving nature of online spaces and advocate for a pragmatic approach to data collection and analysis that will support a rich understanding of meaning making in these environments. As such, Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces provides guidance for researchers who wish to design and conduct diverse studies of learning in online contexts.
As researchers advance investigations of learning in online spaces, contemporary studies often target dynamic spaces that are user-driven, social, and collaborative, which we refer to as networked field sites. To capture the interactions within these sites, researchers can draw on a variety of theoretical frameworks, methodological approaches, and data sources to better understand learning in online spaces. For instance, methods for collecting data in online environments often include observation, in-depth interviews, focus group interviews, surveys, and artifact analysis. Though the examination of learning in online spaces may have features similar to traditional face-to-face approaches, some researchers have suggested that “online qualitative research cannot be considered a reproduction of traditional techniques on the Internet but is a different set of tools, with its own peculiar advantages and limitations” (Graffigna & Bosio, 2006, p. 68). Participants’ experiences are informed by both the online and offline world, so it is important for researchers to consider how to attend to data that are drawn from both online and offline spaces.
In many ways, these points are related to Matthew Williams’s (2007) questions about the role of the researcher in online spaces. He has challenged the field to consider these questions:
To what extent is the researcher able to write in a convincing way about the people studied when anonymity inherent in Internet interactions casts doubts upon the identities of research participants? How does the participant observer manage his or her identity in settings mediated by text and graphics, and what impact might this have on data collection? How are researchers to conceptualize the boundaries of online settings and the experiences of those observed? (p. 8)
Williams’s prompts suggest that we need to do more than just select the appropriate method for accessing and collecting data. As online researchers, we argue that:
we need to understand relationships between researchers’ mental models and participants’ experiences (see Chapter One);
we need to grasp how researchers can trace learners’ meaning making across various networked field sites, thereby initiating ways to extend the boundaries of knowledge and traditions (see Chapter Two);
we need to consider how our theories of learning influence the studies that we design and conduct (see Chapter Three);
we need to place greater emphasis on the complicated aspects of researchers’ reflexivity, bias, and positioning as research tools (see Chapter Four);
we need to determine how multiple data sources can be assembled and analyzed to capture richer pictures of online meaning making (see Chapters Five and Six);
we need to support and conduct ethical research in online environments (see Chapter Seven); and
we need to continually rethink research methods in light of evolving spaces and practices (see Chapter Eight).
These concepts have led us to contemplate how researchers approach online learning and advocate for moving beyond tradition; in order to understand multidimensional and multi-sited learning, researchers need to be creative in their approaches to data collection and analysis. Such a pragmatic stance is not about a cavalier disregard for tradition; rather it is about responding to an evolving learning landscape that supports not only new and creative forms of meaning making, but also more expansive research designs. As such, we see the future of research in online learning as requiring multiple approaches. Extending ideas from the mixed methods tradition, John W. Creswell (2015) proposed that multimethod approaches allow researchers to collect and analyze multiple forms of qualitative data to better understand a given study. By supporting a multimethod approach, we contend that researchers will be able to describe how people make meaning in online environments.
The Structure of This Book
Conducting Qualitative Research of Learning in Online Spaces
