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ONE
Epistemological Dimensions in
Qualitative Research: the Construction
of Knowledge Online
Overview: this chapter introduces the aims of the book. In doing so, it explores how the advent of the Internet has inspired new ways of thinking about the nature of qualitative inquiry and how research is conducted using different methods of data collection. It takes up the theoretical concerns about how knowledge is constructed in qualitative research and the potential this holds for online interviewing. Finally, the chapter concludes by providing an overview of the chapters to follow.
Introduction
In a matter of very few years, the Internet has consolidated itself as a powerful platform that has changed the way individuals communicate. In 2007, there were 1.24 billion Internet users (Burkeman, 2008). The Internet has become the universal source of information for millions of people, at home, at school, and at work. It has had significant impact on the conditions of social interac- tion and the way in which individuals construct the reality of everyday lives. It has reconfigured the way in which individuals communicate and connect with each other. The ‘trajectory of acquaintanceship development’ has become such that individuals can now first get to know each other online through chat rooms, before using other media such as email, telephone and face-to-face contact (Zhao, 2006: 471). There has been a rapid increase in websites such as Youtube, MySpace, Facebook and blogs of many descriptions, that allow people to present themselves, create presentations of themselves, present their views and invite the views of others. Such websites also offer opportunities for ‘social networking’ and they are clearly reshaping the way in which news and views are gathered and disseminated (Goodfellow, 2007). Coinciding with the global expansion of the Internet, is its popularisation as a research medium for the collection of primary data, as seen in marketing research and the field of communications and media research. More recently, the Internet has been used as a research medium in the social sciences, opening up innovative ways for researchers to examine human inter/actions
and experiences in new contexts. Consequently, there has been a growth of literature discussing the Internet as a tool for research. Over the last decade there has been a number of ground-breaking books including Jones (1999) Doing Internet Research, an edited collection of studies which examined Internet research methods, Mann and Stewart (2000) Internet Communication and Qualitative Research and Hine (2000) Virtual Ethnography. These texts have examined the impact of Internet technology as both a medium for col- lecting data, and a product of culture that infiltrates other spaces and times of its participants. Further, virtual training packages such as that developed by Madge et al. (2006) have been critical in enhancing users’ understanding of both qualitative and quantitative online research methods. Advances in Internet technology have offered researchers innovative approaches to online research in the social sciences (Jankowski and vam Selm, 2005). The Internet has had considerable affect on the way in which qualita- tive inquiry takes place in the social sciences. In particular, it has altered the nature of context in which research takes place, and knowledge is constructed. ‘Electronic virtuality is now embedded within actuality in a more dispersed and active way than ever before’ (Hammersley, 2006: 8). The Internet has offered researchers exciting possibilities to explore and understand human experience by taking conventional research designs and methods and adapting them for the virtual environment. Hine (2005: 5) has commented that: ‘Research on the “Internet” is marked as a distinct topic worthy of specific note by the introduction of new epithets to familiar methods.’ The Internet offers a different space and dimension in which familiar research methods can be used to allow researchers to write about who their partici- pants are, and what they know. Further ‘Each manifestation of these technologies of mediation presents opportunities for the evolution of those traditional methods of social investigation’ (Stewart and Williams, 2005: 396). The Internet has greatly expanded the possibilities of conducting research with individuals and communities, providing a virtual social arena where practices, meanings and identities can intermingle between researchers and participants in ways that may not be possible in the real world (Dominguez et al., 2007). This raises questions around how researchers:
(i) Enter the virtual world to collect and communicate participants’ experiences. (ii) Understand experience, and explain how they know what they know in the virtual world. (iii) Ensure that such knowledge is adequate and legitimate, given the social, cultural and legal terrain of the Internet.
This book examines such issues by focusing on the use of interviewing as an online method of qualitative inquiry. The online interview presents both methodological and ethical potential and versatility in social science research. It also presents methodological and ethical challenges that need to be addressed when using the Internet to conduct research.
6 Online Interviewing
Epistemology has considerable bearing on the way researchers undertake their research projects. Some researchers interested in the social world are critical of the objectivism found in positivist and post-positivist stances that apply the methods of the natural sciences to the study of social reality and beyond (see Bryman, 2004 for a more detailed discussion of objectivism). Instead, researchers have argued for the need to focus social inquiry on under- standing subjective meanings and values of individual actions. Such a stance can be linked to Max Weber’s (1864–1920) Verstehen (understanding). To find meaning in action, requires researchers to interpret in a particular way what individuals are doing (Schwandt, 2000: 191). This process of interpretation can be differently represented through hermeneutics, phenomenology and symbolic interactionism. These philosophical or theoretical positions embrace different perspectives on the aims of understanding human action, differ- ent ethical commitments, and methodological and epistemological issues (Schwandt, 2000: 190). These philosophies provide a lens through which researchers can examine the research process and data. The kind of lens researchers choose to work with will influence how they view and make sense of the social world as a researcher. Table 1.2 gives an overview of these philosophies that provide different ways of addressing what individuals are doing or saying. It can also be used to explain the aims and methods of qualitative inquiry.
8 Online Interviewing
Table 1.2 Philosophical assumptions in the generation of knowledge in qualitative research Phenomenology Hermeneutics Symbolic Interactionism Human behaviour is a Meaning is participative and Interaction takes place in product of how individuals thus cannot be produced by such a way that the individual interpret the world. The aim the researcher. The point is continually interprets the is to grasp and understand not to reveal truth but to symbolic meaning of his/her how individuals come to engage with the effects of environment. Researchers interpret theirs and others tradition in a dialogical catch the process of actions meaningfully. It encounter with what is not interpretation through which requires researchers to understood and clarify the individuals construct their engage with phenomena and conditions in which actions. make sense of them directly understanding may take and immediately. place, and thus disclose meaning. Source : Crotty (1998).
There are parallels between these stances and each will have distinctive epistemological concerns for the qualitative researcher, and different ways of addressing those concerns. At the very least, researchers have to decide on what is or should be regarded as acceptable knowledge. In doing so they should consider:
(i) How to define what ‘understanding’ means and how to justify claims to understand. (ii) How to conceive and frame the research project. (iii) How to occupy the ethical space where researcher and participant relate to one another in a project. (Schwandt, 2000: 200)
As social scientists, understanding the contexts and actions in which people live out their lives is important for making sense of the discourses they construct. Qualitative research does not have to carry with it fixed epistemo- logical implications. Researchers have to decide what knowledge they want to gather about the social world and how, but epistemological assumptions, values and methods may be inextricably intertwined. This also applies to research on the Internet where people’s everyday multiple realities are spatial and temporal. Advocates of postmodernism see the Internet as a blurring of the distinction between the virtual and the real world. This has created both hyper-reality and hyper-identity, leading to a loss of distinctions and consequent sense of fragmentation (Maclure, 1995). The Internet has altered the realities of everyday lives in which individuals inter- act with each other. It has been substantially broadened to include ‘… social phenomena of massive time-space extension’ (Giddens, 1984: 85). The advent of modernity has increasingly torn space away from place by ‘fostering rela- tions between “absent” others, locationally distant from any given situation of face-to-face interaction’ (Giddens, 1990: 18–19). Online, participants can take on meaningful and multiple identities in ways never before possible, leading to fundamental shifts in how individuals create, experience and understand identity (Turkle, 1995). The Internet, then, can provide a way of ordering human activity in the social world (Cavanagh, 2007: 146). The emergence of email, instant messaging, and chat rooms as well as online public domains has altered the possibilities, scope and general basis of knowledge. This has impli- cations for the nature of reality and existence in the social world and the nature of relationships that exist between individuals/communities. To under- stand reality and being in the virtual world, researchers can now look at humans as they are online (Capurro and Pringle, 2002). It is now possible for individuals who have never met face-to-face to have intimate, mutual knowl- edge through frequent online interactions (Zhao, 2006: 465). Participants and researchers from distant locations and diverse cultural backgrounds can come to know each other too, and construct meanings without ever seeing each other (Bowker and Tuffin, 2004). The Internet, despite the absence of face-to-face interactions, creates a setting for research purposes and provides considerable opportunities to study the world beyond reach from the point of view of individuals and groups (Lincoln and Guba, 2000). In naturalistic settings, such as virtual communities, researchers can gain knowledge about the meaning of action taking place.
Epistemological Dimensions in Qualitative Research^9
that researchers adopt. When interviews are conducted online, these frames of reference are lost, leading to reliance on the written word. Whether online research is composed asynchronously or synchronously the construction of knowledge will occur through textual means of representation (Doherty, 2007: 6). Methodologically, researchers may need to consider other factors that can shape participants’ perspectives such as biographies and identities. Yet, the text-based temporal and spatial nature of virtual communication means that researchers can ‘collect rich data about the subjective self, a self accessed in what may be experienced as an almost transparent process of relating to one’s own consciousness’ (Mann and Stewart, 2000: 95). This can lead to a ‘textual reflexivity’ that reveals the ‘text as much more – and also much less – than just a transparent representation of “the way things are”’ (Stones, 1996: 97). This can encourage participants to engage in a more expansive discussion, and give online researchers an insight into the frames that participants use to constitute their reality, and the complexities of human expression. However, from a social constructivist position, such texts are devoid of meaning in their own right. Meaning is a process that is socially determined. It cannot exist independently of the interpreter and so all claims to knowledge will occur in a particular conceptual framework. Knowing is not passive. Individuals make knowledge and make sense of it. Meaning is constructed through the world and objects in the world (Illingworth, 2006). All these challenges (and opportunities) raise questions about the nature of research practice that is adopted by online researchers to capture such sources of knowledge. Some researchers have argued in favour of an epistemology and ontology of research that stresses ‘the hybrid and unfinished character of cyberspace …’ (Teli et al., 2007). In other words, if researchers are to understand life online, they have to understand that participants’ experiences are connected and shaped by cultural and social elements that are both real and virtual, public and private and online and offline. To capture this connectedness suggests a methodology that can research the connected spaces – the real - contexts and actions of the research participants and their exploits online.
Methods of Data Collection in the Construction of Knowledge:
Face-to-face and Online Interviewing
Knowledge in qualitative research is constructed through the social processes of researchers engaging with the other participants in their studies. Research using qualitative methods are closely linked to researchers’ different visions of how social reality should be studied, and what can be regarded as acceptable knowledge (Bryman, 2004). In the construction of knowledge, social scientists have viewed the face-to-face encounter as the optimal way to actively engage with research participants in qualitative research (Seymour, 2001). It has been
Epistemological Dimensions in Qualitative Research^11
perceived as the most powerful way in which researchers can seek to gain an understanding of how people construct their lives and the stories they tell about them (Fontana and Frey, 2003). When researcher and participant(s) meet face-to-face, physical and visual interaction can provide detail on each others’ identity and about the situation eliciting the emotion (Sade-Beck, 2004). The presence of verbal and non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures, postures and emotional mannerisms all add a further layer to individ- uals’ social presence, and to the social interaction taking place. In the exchange of such cues, researcher and participant(s) can observe each others’ behaviours and attributes. In these face-to-face encounters, researchers use a variety of research meth- ods to study everyday life and social interactions, to reveal the rich symbolic world that underlies needs, desires, meanings and choice (see for example Oakley, 1984; Atkinson and Hammersley, 1998; Flick, 2002). Such methods are designed to develop ‘an analytic understanding of individual’s perspectives, activities and actions … that are likely to be different from, perhaps even in conflict with, how the people themselves see the world’ (Hammersley, 2006: 5). Further, the use of multiple methods such as case studies, personal experience and stories and visual texts to describe moments and meanings in individual lives, allows researchers to collect rich, descriptive and contextually situated data in order to seek understandings of human experience or relationships within a community or culture (Silverman, 1999). The use of qualitative interviews in the social sciences has led to a broad range of discussions about how such interviews are designed and used as a method of data collection, and where they are located epistemologically and methodologically. Atkinson and Silverman (1997) argue that this has created an ‘interview society’ in which there is, ‘a commitment to and reliance on the interview to produce narrative experience …’ (Fontana and Frey, 2003: 63). Interviews as social arenas provide both vehicles and sites through which people construct and contest explications for their views and actions (Foucault, 1977). These arenas can include both group and individual interviews that produce a wealth of data about people’s experiences, thoughts and feelings from their perspective. These methods then can become the site for the construction, interpretation, understanding and representation of experience. Constructing knowledge in online research takes many forms. To date, social scientists have explored how traditional qualitative methods of research can be utilised and adapted in the virtual arena to examine how they make and validate knowledge as well as what that knowledge is. Researchers can engage in one-to-one interviews or with participants in groups to investigate the social processes of existing online communities. For example, Bampton and Cowton (2002) used email to interview teachers about their experiences of teaching management accounting in higher education (HE). Hinton-Smith (2006) also used email to explore the experiences of lone parents as HE
12 Online Interviewing
Table 1.
The processes of knowledge construction in online and face-to-face interviews
Online interviews
Face-to-face interviews
Cost
Cheaper to conduct. There is no need for
Greater costs incurred, for example travelling to
transcription as there is a continuous and visible
location for interviews and transcription costs.
record of the interview.However online interviews from home requireconsiderable commitment from participants if theyhave to remain online for extended periods of time.
Access
Allows access to individual/groups not possible to
Easier to exclude certain individuals/groups
reach/interview by telephone or face-to-face
because they are geographically dispersed,
interview or have geographically distant location.
marginalised or disabled.
However, only people with access to the Internet
It may be more difficult for participants with
and/or have experience of online facilities/
language/communication barriers to become
keyboard skills will be able to participate,
involved in the research.
particularly in synchronous focus groups.
Temporal dimension
Asynchronous interviews are non-real-time and
Real-time. The immediacy of social presence that
seen as an important part of online interaction.
takes places when researchers and participantsmeet is a critical part of the research relationship.
Synchronous interviews are real-time.
The notion of social space includes temporal,physical, intellectual and interpersonal relationships.Focus groups can compound the effects of suchfactors, for example by individuals displayingparticular attitudes, positions or status differencesin front of other group participants.
Nature and speed of response
In asynchronous interviews, participants can reread
Researchers and participants can spontaneously
what they have previously written, reflect on and
share place and time to produce sensitive and
consider their responses, enriching the text.
in-depth data that reflects the interests of both.
However, there is also a greater risk of
Non-response is also easier to observe.
non-response. In synchronous interviewsresponses are spontaneous.
Table 1.
(Continued)
Online interviews
Face-to-face interviews
Time
Provides the possibility to interview more than one
Constrained by time pressures. But participants
participant/group at a time.
show less tendency to terminate the interview asand when they wish.
Asynchronous interviews can take several days/weeks. Synchronous interviews will be constrainedby time.However, external distractions can interrupt theflow of the online interview, of which the researchermay be unaware, resulting in the participant’stemporary or prolonged disengagement with theinterview.
Venue and participation
Email/discussion board.
Venue plays an important part in influencing theinterview process, taking place in settings that mayinvolve the participant’s home, the researcher’sinstitution or more neutral sites in which theresearcher has a physical presence.Situating discourse within the physical location thatis familiar to participants may enhance theirwillingness to disclose and hence the richness ofdata gathered.
Quality of data
The long period of asynchronous interviews can
Visual and verbal cues are important social signals
aid collection of in-depth data as it involves
in face-to-face interviews and can establish rapport
repeated interactions and closer reflection of
with the participant(s) especially if the participants
interview issues. However, in asynchronous
are unknown to the researcher.
interviews that can continue for weeks, the researcherhas to work hard to maintain rapport and probing
(Continued)
This book seeks to provide that investigation, with specific focus on online interviewing. It discusses how knowledge is constructed in this disembodied, anonymous and textual environment, and how that environment affects research relationships when the visual and verbal clues present in face-to-face conversations are absent. In part, we have drawn on our own research studies to illustrate this. In addition, we have drawn on a wide range of research studies to stimulate ongoing debate and reflection about online interviewing. We too, are active qualitative researchers who have acquired our Internet expertise through our involvement in two separate studies using email inter- viewing to understand the narratives through which our participants expressed their perspectives of their work experiences and identities (Busher, 2001; James, 2003). The preceding discussion suggests the Internet has the potential to open up a deeper view of life that is derived from real events and feelings as conversa- tions, as well as exposing those experiences, which might otherwise not be heard or read. Researchers can draw on the observations of the rich and com- plex online lives of their participants to understand cultural meaning and highlight the complexity of daily social experience through online discourse, and analyse situated behaviour (Wyn and Katz, 1997; Mann and Stewart, 2000). This has implications for ‘how’ and ‘where’ knowledge is constructed by individuals and, as researchers, how we make sense of social reality (Illingworth, 2006). Chapter Two continues the examination of tensions in the construction of knowledge by discussing the nature of online relationships and interactions and how individuals acquire knowledge of each other. In the conduct of online research, the researcher is presented with many methodological tensions because of its complex, diffuse and multi-faceted structure (Jones, 1999). Chapters Three and Four examine the methodologi- cal and theoretical implications of developing qualitative research projects using online interviews, not only in terms of issues around design, but in terms of shifting boundaries and the nature and displacement of time and space. Chapter Five will explore how researchers need to reflect ethically upon their research practice, the nature of online interactions with participants, and the impacts of these practices and interactions on those being researched. Qualitative research is highly personal and more contextual than quantitative research, and so the integrity of the researcher is crucial. Further, it is a holistic process in which participants share experiences and perspectives with researchers. When face-to-face contact is absent it is important to consider how such a situation could affect participants. This makes it difficult for researchers to be sure about the authenticity and identity of online contributions beyond what they are told by their participants (Hammersley, 2006: 8). This also suggests a situation in which participants are unsure about what to expect in online settings. Such issues will be examined in Chapter Six, particularly the challenges of constructing credible and authentic research when all or part of the data is collected online. Chapter Seven explores issues around power
Epistemological Dimensions in Qualitative Research^17
relations. It will discuss whether online settings can provide an arena in which both researchers and participants can exercise power and authority in the construction and explication of their views and actions. Chapter Eight examines the dilemmas in understanding online communi- ties and their cultures, of constructing qualitative data as ‘text’ and the impli- cations of such text for analysis not only in terms of content, but also on those individuals who have produced it. Chapter Nine extends this discussion by exploring how researchers can present data in an effort to find satisfactory boundaries between the private and public, and whether the text should become meaningful in the public sphere. The final chapter, Chapter Ten, concludes by bringing together the practical implications raised throughout the previous discussions in the book. It will consider how online researchers might tackle the epistemological and method- ological challenges and exciting opportunities facing them in the construction of online research methods, such as interviews. From the above discussion, it is evident that researchers using the Internet to conduct online interviews face some serious epistemological, methodologi- cal and ethical questions in their research practice. The online setting does differ from the face-to-face and this has important implications for the research process in terms of time and space constraints, modes of communication supported, and a blurred distinction between public and private domains. Together, with our and other studies discussed in this book, we hope our expe- riences will offer an invaluable basis for extending discussion, debate and inno- vation about such issues, in the conduct of Internet - based online interviews.
Practical Points for Online Researchers
- Think about the implications of epistemology for your research practice.
- Decide what kind of knowledge you want to gather about the online world you are researching.
- Consider how you will justify your philosophical stance in online research.
- Think about how you are going to enter the online setting, the context of interaction and how you will communicate participants’ experiences.
Suggested Further Reading
Campbell, D.T. (1998) Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science, Selected Papers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Crotty, M. (1998) The Foundations of Social Research: Meanings and Perspectives in the Research Process. London: Sage Publications. Gilbert, N. (2008) Researching Social Life. London: Sage Publications.
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