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 ...