Collecting Data from Internet

Carmicheal’s

At the beginning of the chapter, Carmicheal pointed the issue of the limitation of doing secondary analysis: not sharing same feelings as primary researchers. However, in later sections of this chapter, they provided databases and archives that make the reanalysis of secondary data possible. Before I read this chapter intensively, I thought secondary data analysis shares many similarities with meta-synthesis. However, it appears to me that secondary data analysis is different from meta-synthesis as the former one doesn’t deal with synthesizing primary data. Researchers who reanalyzed secondary data sources might use one set of data, but aim to answer different research questions. However, I am a bit suspicious of secondary data analysis activities, especially for ethnographers. In qualitative research, researchers are participants. Like situative learning environment, observations of ethnographic studies are not independent from the research context. However, researchers of secondary data could not situate the studies back to original contexts.

Carmicheal also pointed out sharing meta-codes to follow researchers. Connecting my own experiences of using Dedoose of doing paper meta-synthesis, Dedoose does a good job of presenting meta-codes clearly to researchers. The codes could also be exported as separate files with majority data.

Hine:

At the beginning of the article, Hine suggested that internet provides opportunities for researchers to engage with ethnographic studies. Internet should be not treated as a separate social sphere. Rather, it is one of multi-dimensional social life. Therefore, ethnographers take advantage of online communities to conduct observations in natural settings. The social communities organized in virtual world present researchers with richness and breadth of social practices that, otherwise, will not be shown with full breadth by statistics. In my research field, computer supported collaborative learning, some researchers used asynchronous, online discussion forum as their major data source. Some do discourse analysis and some employ the code and count method. In one online community, participants’ practices are situated within a particular cultural environment, which Hine also brought up in the article. This requires researchers integrate the cultural aspect into their analysis, such as considering the cultural dimension in discourse analysis. Hine also questioned doing content analysis and tracking patterns out from the analysis. Due to the integrations of social structure and cultural aspect in the community, simply drawing patterns out of data might raise some problems.

Being connected with Carmicheal’s work, in which he proposed that internet activities are one of the multi-dimensions of social life, Hine pointed out that social network analysis connects online activities well with offiline activities.

Garcia et al:

Garcia proposed that researchers as experiencers rather than observers. Therefore, lots of studies suggest researchers should act as participants or members of one community, or acting in a lurking role to study cultural issues of one community. However, I am bit worried about the experiential roles researchers take would affect their stances of observation. Although researchers would have a deeper understanding of the community, acting as participants rather than observers would affect their subjective stance as they would report their experiences of participation rather than observations.

Garcia and her co-authors pointed out the importance of integrating multiple sources of data, such as virtual data with textual data. This connects back with Carmicheal’s notions of having different data sources triangulated.