HELPING PEOPLE'S

Jenna Condie is a Lecturer in Psychology in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Salford. She is also the network's avid Twitter Manager. Contact her on @jennacondie. Although an advocate of both digital communication and qualitative methods, I am yet to combine these two interests to carry out qualitative interviews online. The timing therefore seemed right for me to review ‘Qualitative Online Interviews’ by Dr Janet Salmons, as I do want (or need!) to learn more about this growing approach within social science research. ‘Qualitative Online Interviews’ guides the novice researcher through the entire research process from start to finish. Not to be “shelved after a single reading” (Salmons, 2015, p. xviii), this book is designed as a ‘go to’ resource to consult as and when a particular research issue arises. The updates in the second edition reflect the increasingly mediated nature of our social lives since the first edition was published in 2010. An e-interview rese...

Janet Salmons is a network member and a contributing expert to the online team.  There are nearly as many kinds of research approaches as there are questions to study. While it is the task of the researcher to match approach to question, it is clear that some researchers simply prefer one approach over another, and select types of questions that permit them to carry out the inquiry in the preferred way. I admit it, I am guilty. While I see the value in all sorts of studies, I would not be content to crunch Big Data, even if it meant I could generate impressive maps and diagrams. I want to learn about their experiences first hand. I want to know why. Why did you make that choice and not another, why was it important to you, why do you plan to do things differently in the future? I cannot ask an extant mountain of Big Data to tell me more. Online interviews allow researchers to pose questions in a variety of ways with participants anywhere, at any time. In synchronous interviews we ...

Janet Salmons is a network member and a contributing expert to the online team.  The cover of the Going Viral book attracted my attention at the Association of Internet Researchers’ conference—and stimulated my curiosity. “Going viral” is another of those terms we commonly use, but what does it really mean? By understanding the term, can we become better observers of viral events? I asked the authors, Karine Nahon @karineb and Jeff Hemsley @JeffHemsley if they would share some insights with the NSMNSS community. Our discussion went like this: JS: Can you discuss the research or thought process that went into your definition for “virality” as described on page 16? Virality is a social information flow process where many people simultaneously forward a specific information item, over a short period of time, within their social networks, and where the message spreads beyond their own social network to different, often distant networks, resulting in a sharp acceleration in the number...

We held a small event on Friday 21st February 2014, our goal was to have a series of focused discussions around the ethical dimensions of social media research and to come up with a series of action points for the network to take forward. The day also included two presentations of related research by network members. You can read a a storify of the day  -  sfy.co/rPSZ   W e will post more about the outcomes and discussions shortly but we want to kick off by sharing links to the two reports and presentations.  A team from NatCen has been researching the views of social media users on how their posted data should be handled by researchers. The findings are illuminating and will help to inform how we consider we should work with social media data in the future. You can read a post by the research team here , and then the findings here . Now Janet Salmons introduces the research she has undertaken on what researchers need to help support their ethical practice when condu...

By  Janet Salmons, PhD   #einterview We have heard researchers’ voices throughout NSMNSS events, Tweetchats and blog posts. Students, alt-academic independent researchers, respected scholars and research institute staff have discussed wide-ranging methodological and ethical issues associated with media-related research. Publication is an important next step for any researcher, one we have not yet explored in the NSMNSS project. To introduce an editor’s perspective into the mix I asked New Media & Society editor Dr. Steve Jones to share some insights. New media was indeed new in 1999 when Dr. Jones and colleagues Nicholas Jankowski, Rohan Samarajiva and Roger Silverstone launched New Media & Society. With appreciation for the potential of emerging ways and means of communication they sought to create an international, interdisciplinary journal that could “contribute to the social, cultural and political understanding of new media and information tech...