Highlights from research methods presentation at University of Liverpool November 2016. Not for reuse or circulation with permission of the author.

1. Qualitative research
on/in/of the internet
Katrina Pritchard
@DrKPritchard
https://katrinapritchard.wordpress.com/
Katrina.Pritchard@open.ac.uk (until 15/1/17)
© 2016 Pritchard. All rights reserved.
Barbie name and image TM and © 2014 Mattel. All Rights Reserved.
Highlights of Research
Methods Presentation for
Liverpool University School
of Management
29/11/16
Images and research data
have been removed from
this version.

2. Session overview
 What is it all about?
 Relevance and Hype
 Example approaches:
Trawling
Episodic
Tracking
Offline
 Ongoing challenges and future directions

3. What is it all about?

4. What is it all about?
 Internet research:
an umbrella term that includes various online, e-research,
digital, internet-based or internet-mediated approaches
which use or apply or study some aspects of Web 2.0
 Research is continually evolving and developing alongside the
internet:
as it becomes more interactive and ‘socially orientated’
(Fleischer, 2011: 538)
and more ‘dynamic and ephemeral’ (Mautner, 2005: 817)
where content (data) is constantly changing.

5. What is it all about?
 Internet research is neither inherently good or bad - both
optimistic and pessimistic outcomes are predicted
 Not just academics:
‘googilization’ of research
social movements and online organising around ‘evidence’
rise of analytics within organisations and as a commercial
service
a new profession? “what data scientists do is make
discoveries while swimming in data” (Patil & Davenport, 2012)

6. Trouble with terminology
 There is always trouble with terminology!
 Key issues:
New and emerging context with unstable and evolving terms
Prefixation tendencies (e.g. ‘big data’)
Some approaches haven’t really changed that much but
become jazzed up (e.g. online survey)
 Existing tensions between fields/methods seem amplified when
there is competition in a new context

7. What is actually going on?
 The transfer of an existing ‘offline’ method online: METHOD PUSH
 Face-to-face interview vs interview by email, skype, instant message
 Physical participant observation vs internet ethnography within a chat room or online world
 The method then evolves alongside developments of the online context that is being
researched
 The transfer of an existing ‘offline’ context online: TOPIC PULL
 Focusing on the representation of issues online e.g. organisation websites, blog posts
 Looking at new ways in which issues are emerging online
 Often data is downloaded and treated as just another form of ‘secondary data’
 OR online data is regarded as ‘different’ (e.g. tweets and sentiment analysis)
 Again, methods evolve alongside developments in online environments

8. What are the emerging areas?
 New opportunities for
methods/topics/data emerge together
e.g. researching Digital Labour
 Amazon Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower,
and Clickworker
 Connect to individuals who provide the
requested service (including research)
through the Internet
 Paid vs online volunteering
 Similar to ‘less visible, unsung forms of
traditional women’s labour such as child
care, housework and surrogacy’ (Scholz,
2013: 2).

9. What is actually going on?
 Notions of impact and engagement encourage
researchers to become part of the dataset
AND
 Participatory approaches enable the participants to
co-construct the research
BUT
 Digital divide (openness – what does this mean)
 Power on the internet (more than solar)

10. What is actually going on?
 Research interest in the complexity of on/offline experience is
increasing
AND
 Researchers are using tools that provide a means of capturing the
offline via technological mediation and moving it online (data
repository)

11. What is actually going on?
 Appreciation of the complexity of digital spaces is increasing and difficult questions are being
asked about fundamental issues such as informed consent
 Appreciation of the complexity of digital temporality is increasing and …….
 snippets, fragments and hints at data
 tweets, youtube videos, slideshare presentations, posts and comments etc.
 data that might never be data (e.g. moderation processes, links between big data and ‘big brother’)
 composite/transient nature of websites and online media
 images, text, tags, hyperlinks
 “a unique mixture of the ephemeral and the permanent” (Schneider & Foot, 2004:115)
 Researchers have to make difficult decisions that shape the research process

12. Relevance and hype

13. Relevance?
 Web 2.0 “permeates and even replaces traditional forms of
organizing” (Pablo and Hardy, 2012: 822)
 Challenges the “assumption that organising necessarily occurs in
organisations” (Ashcraft, 2007:11)
 “Media spectacle” (Tan, 2011): follow stories as they unfold across
various different media
 Images, text, tags, hyperlinks combing in “a unique mixture of the
ephemeral and the permanent” (Schneider & Foot, 2004:115)

14. Relevance?
 Unpack and explore what we might previously have labelled ‘context’ or ignored
 Look at interactions between organizations and/or the ways in which organizations
engage with others via the internet
 Engage with new forms of organizing and work
 Examine the ways in which individuals (including employees, customers etc.) engage
with different organizations
 Explore the role of different actors and media within debates relevant to organizational
studies

15. Hype?
 More data?
Meta data
Wild data
Ghost data
Synchronous and cotemporaneous vs
Archive and archaeological data
 Is the data ‘big’ or is there just lots of it?

16. Example approaches:
Trawling
Episodic
Tracking
Offline

17. Trawling
 Using freely available tools to search online
But issues re search outcomes in some cases e.g. twitter
 Can be done across a range of media concurrently
But risk of overload
 Can be done in real time or retrospectively
But data collected may differ

18. Trawling A: Generations
 Daily search process (e.g. Google Alerts and Twilerts) over 150 days during 2011/2
 Additional material via snowballing (at the time and retrospectively) particularly to collect
comments
 checking too soon did not allow for hyperlinks and comments to be posted, wait too long and content may
‘move’ or be lost
 Over 800 composite data items varying from less than one page to over 60
 Emergent RQ on generations:
 How are generations discursively constructed in UK online news texts, with a specific focus on baby boomers
and the lost generation?
 Focused two generations and subset of data from UK
 comprised texts totalling 24000 words for baby boomers and 25000 words for the lost generation (not mutually
exclusive)
(Research funded by Richard Benjamin Trust with Dr Rebecca Whiting, Birkbeck University of London)

19. Trawling A: Generations
Baby boomers are older and…
 lucky, selfish, conservative, risk adverse,
blocking access to jobs for young people
and in a privileged financial position with
contested entitlement to paid work
 alternatively, as victims, having lost their
savings and struggling to find work
 responsible for the creation of the lost
generation, including the negative
consequences e.g. potential unrest, as a
consequence of baby boomers’ past agency
 having lost the ability to protest with
meaningful impact
Lost generation are young and…
 unlucky, jobless with an (unearned) sense of
entitlement to work, an entitlement widely taken
for granted but challenged through disputed
individual capability
 their talent is presented as potentiality
 as the most disadvantaged in relation to finding
work
 as child-like in their lack of ability to accept or
take responsibility, e.g. tackling their joblessness is
beyond the individual capacity
 as a group ready to riot who, without access to
work, as both damaged and likely to cause
damage if issues of unemployment are not
addressed

20. Trawling A: Generations
 Tensions between baby boomers and the lost generation are emergent rather than
natural states
 A key feature is the conflation and entanglement of these generational labels with age
groups based on chronology
 Familial generational understandings are enrolled within this cohort-focused debate e.g.
lost generation’s construction as child-like in their lack of ability to accept or take
responsibility
 Generational categories are deployed in ways that legitimate age-related differences
with regard to work, in particular, the entitlement of different age groups to paid work
 Use of dormant term (lost generation) allows previous cultural understandings to be re-
assigned, re-understood and used with political effects
(See Pritchard and Whiting, 2014 for more details)

21. Trawling B: Images of HRM
 “The internet has demanded that almost every aspect of organizations is visualised –
not just customer facing operations such as marketing, but also accounting, finance,
investor relations, human resources, and public relations” (Bell et al, 2014: 30)
 Web images were collected over 8 wks in 2014 (4 x image searches for Human
Resource Management’ on different devices with different image search tools)
 Word based schematics excluded, duplicates removed = dataset of 234 images
 Examined via critical visual analysis incorporating reflexive, compositional and
semiotic analysis (Baetens, 2013; Bell, 2012; Rose, 2012).

22. Trawling B: Images of HRM
 Reflexive and initial compositional analysis: making sense of these images
 Features within compositional analysis:
 Gender and appearance
 Maps, cogs and jigsaws
 Relationships, groups and connections
 What claims about HRM are conveyed in these images?
 HRM as a core activity: straightforward, generic, trouble-free
 HRM as a profession: organising, scrutinising, manipulating

23. Episodic
 Rather than trying to sweep or trawl the internet for topic
relevant data here the focus is on a specific event or episode
 Murthy (2012) suggests twitter is event based
 tags and trends reinforce event focus
 ‘shortitudional’ research
 discursive event: temporally and contextually bounded
episode (Hardy & Maguire, 2010)
 Challenges:
 selecting the event
 identifying event boundaries
 understanding data boundaries

24. Episodic A: Missing Million
 Examining online coverage of two announcements relating to
UK unemployment
 Compare and contrast debates surrounding the ‘missing million’
of younger (16 to 24) and older (over 50s) UK unemployed in
2011 and 2014 respectively
 Explore how unemployment is constructed, and differential
positioning, for these groups
(Research funded by Richard Benjamin Trust with Dr Rebecca Whiting, Birkbeck University of London)

25. Episodic A: The Missing million
Missing million: Youth 2011
 Unemployment as a natural disaster:
Flood, famine and fire
 Statistics, questioning statistics and
comparative statistics: The numbers
game
 Responsibilities and solutions: work
experience programmes (the poundland
paradox)
Missing million: Older 2014
 Anything but ‘unemployment’: waste and
inactivity as untapped economic asset
 Estimates, euphemisms and expansion:
The numbers game
 Responsibilities and solutions: enterprise
and volunteering

26. Tracking
 Follow particular people or groups of interest due to their engagement with a
specific topic
 Involves tracking interactions across various media usually from a particular
‘spring board’ within existing data (or as in the example that follows from a
chance encounter online)
 Easy to do using freely available internet tools (see challenges from earlier)
 The ‘participant’ is not anonymous but individuals remain largely unnamed
(though specific texts may involve identifying ‘key players’)
 The ‘participant’ here is unaware they are being tracked

27. Tracking A: Barbie
 Prompted by new stories on launch of Entrepreneur Barbie in February 2014.
 Set up alerts and twitter searches for ‘entrepreneur Barbie” and “career Barbie” (data
set includes 200+ texts and images alongside in excess of ten thousand tweets)
 Extended to ‘Computer Engineer Barbie’ and the new ‘Game Developer Barbie’
 Research Aim: to examine the impact of digital discourse on the gendering of these
careers
 Data are both explicitly related to representations of Barbie but importantly also
highlight how Barbie is deployed as a stereotype within discussions about gender and
career
 e.g. within debates about the ‘lean in’ phenomenon which encourages women to
market themselves to achieve success in entrepreneurial and technology careers
(Sandberg, 2014).
(Research with Dr Kate Mackenzie Davey and Helen Cooper, Birkbeck University of London)

28. Going off line
 “the meaning of images is not fixed, but dynamic and open to
continual interpretation as part of an ongoing circuit of
communication” (Bell and Davison, 2012)
 How to examine interactivity in Web 2.0?
Capturing consumption online e.g. via comments, shares, etc.
Attempting to engage with consumption offline
Photo elicitation with web images
But static approach

29. Going offline A: Barbie
 Visual Research using photo elicitation w/ 58 participants, posing the
question: what are your impressions of these photos?
 Research questions: Can Barbie be an entrepreneur? Can an entrepreneur
be Barbie?
 Thematic analysis (King, 2012):
 the image itself
 these images as a representation of another group or category
 A personal response; their own positioning in relation to the images.

30.  Reactions by image vs changing reactions across them:
 Positive: a celebration
 Critical: challenging what is real/unreal
 Negative: can’t have it all
 Stereotypes elicited laughter, sadness, anger, shame, admiration,
sympathy
 Entrepreneurial limitations
 How and to what extent femininity is enacted by entrepreneurs as
controversial and conflicted
Going offline A: Barbie

31. Ongoing challenges and future
directions

32. Ongoing challenges
 Depth vs. breadth
 Privacy, surveillance and authenticity
 Be different or be the same?
Transforming data to text
Geographically locate the data
Applying ‘traditional’ qualitative methods
 Ongoing development and evolution of Web 2.0
Wearables, leaked data etc.

33. Ongoing challenges: ethics
 Ethical guides tend to lag behind; institutional ethics committees
even more so
 Issues of translating core ideals about ‘public spaces’ and ‘privacy’
to the internet
 Divisions between primary and secondary data
 Anonymise, cloak or attribute?
 Way forward: not a form or a checklist but contextualized,
continual approach to ethical appraisal
 Considering the researcher’s online profile too

34. Ongoing challenges: too much or too little
data?
 Data deluge: its not just a problem for quantitative big data
 However: Twitter search application program interface (API)
only provides 1% of actual traffic (Burnap et al., 2015).
 Issues of re-use, recontextualisation and
recycling
 Difficulties of managing multi-modal data
and data analysis

35. Save the Date!
Research Methods for Digital Work: Innovative Methods for Studying Distributed and
Multi-Modal Working Practices
25 - 26 May 2017
University of Surrey, Guildford, UK
Organized* by Christine Hine (University of Surrey), Katrina Pritchard (Open University)
and Gillian Symon (Royal Holloway University of London).
Call for paper and further details via:
http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/workpractices/cfp.php
Extended abstracts of no more than 1500 words by 31st January 2017
* In association with the Digital World Research Centre at the University of Surrey. The meeting has received
funding from the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Surrey and the RCUK-funded NEMODE Network
Plus.

36. References for examples used
 Whiting, R and Pritchard, K (Forthcoming) ‘Digital Ethics’ in SAGE Handbook of Qualitative
Business and Management Research Methods (Eds. Cassell, C; Cunliffe, A and Grandy, G)
Sage. Completed for publication in 2017.
 Pritchard, K and Whiting, R (Forthcoming) ‘Analysing web images’ in SAGE Handbook of
Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods (Eds. Cassell, C; Cunliffe, A and
Grandy, G) Sage. Completed for publication 2017.
 Pritchard, K; Mackenzie-Davey, K and Cooper H (2016) Barbie and “the plastic
sexualisation of [the] entrepreneur”. Presented at Gender, Work and Organization 2016.
 Pritchard, K and Whiting, R (2015) ‘Taking stock: a visual analysis of gendered ageing’
Gender, Work & Organization SI Problematizing Gendered Ageing in the New Economy,
22 (5) 510-528.
 Pritchard, K and Whiting, R (2014) ‘Baby Boomers and the Lost Generation: On the
discursive construction of generations at work’, Organization Studies SI ‘At a Critical Age:
The Social and Political Organization of Age and Ageing’, 35 (11) 1605-1626.
 Pritchard, K and Whiting, R (2012) ‘Autopilot? A reflexive review of the piloting process in
qualitative e-research’ Qualitative Research in Organizations and Management, 7 (3) 338-
353.
(Links available from: https://katrinapritchard.wordpress.com/)