transmedia resources in collaborative world building.
Ethnography
Ethnography focuses on understanding cultures and communities. It emerged out of the field of anthropology in the early twentieth century and means “writing about people” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p. 44). Ethnography aims to better understand the perspectives, attitudes, shared values, norms, practices, and interactions of a given group of people through rich, thick description (Geertz, 1973). As such, ethnography requires researchers to become participant observers, immersing themselves in a specific community context in order to collect data such as artifacts, interviews, and extensive field notes. In online spaces, researchers have conducted investigations in situ (e.g., Black, 2008; Ito et al., 2010; Lee, 2014), adapting ethnographic methods to engage in online and connective ethnography.
Online ethnography, also referred to as virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000) and netnography (Kozinets, 2009), is concerned with the data collection methods used to understand interactions within online spaces. Online data collection methods build on traditional ethnographic principles, which include a bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1962) of methods and tools that are continually refashioned and reworked to address the needs of the researcher.
Participant observation in online environments, whether through interactions with participants in massively multiplayer gaming worlds (Nardi, 2010; Steinkuehler, 2007), or interactions with participants in fanfiction communities (Magnifico, Curwood, & Lammers, 2015; Martin, et al. 2013), has become a central component within online ethnographic research. However, this kind of research also creates the need for researchers to better understand how to define the boundaries of a learning space. As explained further in Chapter Two, a field site for an online study can be both moving and porous, and researchers need to remain aware of these changes and be flexible in their approaches. The field site is dictated by the interactions among the individuals, the resources and tools that they use, and the social context of the learning situations.
Because of the importance of both online and offline spaces in people’s learning, many researchers have recognized that the online and offline worlds inform one another. Thus, researchers need to pay close attention to the intersections between worlds (Fields & Kafai, 2009; Leander, 2008; Leander & McKim, 2003). One way is through connective ethnography, which acknowledges the connection between online and offline practices and environments.
Kevin M. Leander (2008) explained that, stemming from Hine’s (2000) concept of virtual ethnography, connective ethnography is “a stance or orientation to Internet-related research that considers connections and relations as normative social practices and Intent social spaces as complexly connected to other social spaces” (p. 37). Examples include, but are not limited to, the study of instant messaging practices among adolescents (Jacobs, 2004) or the ways in which immigrant youth develop their literacy skills through their computer-mediated communication (Lam, 2000).
Grounded Theory
Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss (1967) introduced grounded theory to research actions, interactions, and social processes—areas where they felt that other qualitative approaches fell short. Though the two sociologists can be credited with the development of this approach, other researchers have worked to further develop grounded theory methods to enable scholars to have a more fluid and less restrictive approach (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2007; Johnson & Christensen, 2014). For example, Kathy Charmaz (2006) developed her constructivist grounded theory approach to expose the power dynamics between the researcher and the researched.
Grounded theory studies rely on visits to the field site—whether through interviews, observations, or chat logs—and data analysis begins when the researcher is still in the field. The researcher moves back and forth between collecting new data and comparing it to the emerging themes in the data, a process known as constant comparison. As the researcher begins to generate theory, he or she is involved in an initial coding stage, called open coding. In open coding, the researcher takes data and segments it into multiple categories. The second step is axial coding, where the researcher identifies a core concept and returns to the data to better understand how the concept is represented within the data. The final step, selective coding, is where the researcher takes the central concept and relates it back to other categories so that the central concept becomes more refined.
Grounded theory has been used to understand the experiences of students learning in online environments (Crittendon, 2006; Feeler, 2012; Gerber & Price, 2013; Yalof, 2014). For example, in order to understand in-service teachers’ perceptions of games-based learning as a teaching practice, Gerber and Price (2013) conducted a grounded theory analysis of teachers’ discussion boards to better understand teachers’ views of games-based learning within literacy classrooms. Relying on discussion board logs, Gerber and Price studied thirteen teachers enrolled in a graduate class on videogames and literacy. Using constant comparison analysis (featuring open, axial, and selective coding), they analyzed over one hundred discussion boards to gain an understanding of teachers’ views. The use of constant comparison allowed the researchers to continually reformulate their thoughts and theories, as grounded in the discussion board data, and it facilitated the emergence of themes related to collegial surveillance and the lack of available professional development opportunities.
Phenomenology
Phenomenology is rooted in the work of German philosopher Edmund Husserl and is focused on understanding the lived experience of participants in relation to a given phenomenon. For example, Leander and Boldt’s (2013) account of two children playing with manga stories, related toys, and trading cards showed how literacy activities may not always be deliberately designed, but may be improvisational and responsive to current, changing emotions and play conditions. Similarly, Wargo (2015) documented how a participant used smartphone apps like Snapchat and Map My Walk, as well as the gestures that dictate their use (e.g., swiping, tapping), to create, re-create, compose, and share experiential narratives.
According to Creswell (2013) there are two types of phenomenology: hermeneutical phenomenology (van Manen, 1990) and transcendental phenomenology (Moustakas, 1994). Hermeneutical phenomenology is oriented toward understanding the lived experiences by researching the texts of life, which are referred to as the hermeneutics. According to the approach used by Max van Manen, researchers first identify a phenomenon, reflect on essential themes, and maintain a personal connection to these happenings. In their study of the online educators’ experiences, De Gagne and Walters (2010) employed a hermeneutic phenomenological approach in order to gain insight into participants’ narrative accounts. This allowed for a reflection on “how they interpret and express their experiences through interviews” (Polit & Beck, 2004, p. 358).
Given that “phenomenology is not only a description, but also an interpretive process in which the research makes an interpretation... of the meaning of the lived experiences” (Creswell, 2013, p. 80), Clark Moustakas’s transcendental phenomenology seeks to keep researchers’ interpretations separate from the data. In so doing, transcendental phenomenology begins with researchers “describing their own experiences with the phenomenon and bracketing out their views before proceeding with the experiences of others” (Creswell, 2013, p. 80), thereby acknowledging preconceptions prior to data collection and analysis.
Participatory Approaches
Though not an established tradition, and often combined with aforementioned approaches, participatory research is used by researchers who wish to privilege participant voices, reduce researcher bias, and engage in “translocal” understanding (Burnett, Davies, Merchant, & Rowsell, 2014). Rooted in a nonconforming perspective
