Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. Ethnography explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members' own interpretation of such behavior.
Multimethodology or multimethod research includes the use of more than one method of data collection or research in a research study or set of related studies. Mixed methods research is more specific in that it includes the mixing of qualitative and quantitative data, methods, methodologies, and/or paradigms in a research study or set of related studies. One could argue that mixed methods research is a special case of multimethod research. Another applicable, but less often used label, for multi or mixed research is methodological pluralism. All of these approaches to professional and academic research emphasize that monomethod research can be improved through the use of multiple data sources, methods, research methodologies, perspectives, standpoints, and paradigms.
Participant observation is one type of data collection method by practitioner-scholars typically used in qualitative research and ethnography. This type of methodology is employed in many disciplines, particularly anthropology, sociology, communication studies, human geography, and social psychology. Its aim is to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their cultural environment, usually over an extended period of time.
Qualitative research is a type of research that aims to gather and analyse non-numerical (descriptive) data in order to gain an understanding of individuals' social reality, including understanding their attitudes, beliefs, and motivation. This type of research typically involves in-depth interviews, focus groups, or observations in order to collect data that is rich in detail and context. Qualitative research is often used to explore complex phenomena or to gain insight into people's experiences and perspectives on a particular topic. It is particularly useful when researchers want to understand the meaning that people attach to their experiences or when they want to uncover the underlying reasons for people's behavior. Qualitative methods include ethnography, grounded theory, discourse analysis, and interpretative phenomenological analysis. Qualitative research methods have been used in sociology, anthropology, political science, psychology, communication studies, social work, folklore, educational research, information science and software engineering research.
Autoethnography is a form of ethnographic research in which a researcher connects personal experiences to wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings. It is considered a form of qualitative and/or arts-based research.
Digital anthropology is the anthropological study of the relationship between humans and digital-era technology. The field is new, and thus has a variety of names with a variety of emphases. These include techno-anthropology, digital ethnography, cyberanthropology, and virtual anthropology.
Participatory action research (PAR) is an approach to action research emphasizing participation and action by members of communities affected by that research. It seeks to understand the world by trying to change it, collaboratively and following reflection. PAR emphasizes collective inquiry and experimentation grounded in experience and social history. Within a PAR process, "communities of inquiry and action evolve and address questions and issues that are significant for those who participate as co-researchers". PAR contrasts with mainstream research methods, which emphasize controlled experimentation, statistical analysis, and reproducibility of findings.
Internet research ethics involves the research ethics of social science, humanities, and scientific research carried out via the Internet.
Orthographic conventions have varied over time, and vary by publishers, authors, and regional preferences, on whether and when Internet should be capitalized. When the Internet first came into common use, most publications treated Internet as a capitalized proper noun, but this has become less common. This reflects the tendency in English to capitalize new terms and move them to lowercase as they become familiar. The word is sometimes still capitalized to distinguish the global IP-based internet from internets that are smaller or not IP-based, though many publications, including the AP Stylebook since 2016, recommend the lowercase form in every case. In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases, with Internet being preferred in the United States and internet being preferred in the United Kingdom.
Online ethnography is an online research method that adapts ethnographic methods to the study of the communities and cultures created through computer-mediated social interaction. As modifications of the term ethnography, cyber-ethnography, online ethnography and virtual ethnography designate particular variations regarding the conduct of online fieldwork that adapts ethnographic methodology. There is no canonical approach to cyber-ethnography that prescribes how ethnography is adapted to the online setting. Instead individual researchers are left to specify their own adaptations. Netnography is another form of online ethnography or cyber-ethnography with more specific sets of guidelines and rules, and a common multidisciplinary base of literature and scholars. This article is not about a particular neologism, but the general application of ethnographic methods to online fieldwork as practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and other scholars.
Nancy Baym is an American scholar and Senior Principal Research Manager at Microsoft Research, formerly a Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Kansas. She was a member of the founding board and former president of the Association of Internet Researchers, and serves on the board of several academic journals covering new media and communication. She has published research and provided media commentary on the topics of social communication, new media, and fandom.
Internet-mediated research (IMR) is the research conducted through the medium of the Internet. In the medical field, it pertains to the practice of gathering medical, biomedical or health related research data via the internet directly from research subjects. The subject, uses a web browser to view and respond to questionnaires that are included in an approved medical research protocol. Other fields such as geography also use IMR as a research tool.
Netnography is a “form of qualitative research that seeks to understand the cultural experiences that encompass and are reflected within the traces, practices, networks and systems of social media”. It is a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation that can be conceptualized into three key stages: investigation, interaction, and immersion. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data. It is an interpretive research method that adapts the traditional, in-person participant observation techniques of anthropology to the study of interactions and experiences manifesting through digital communications.
A Digital researcher is a person who uses digital technology such as computers or smartphones and the Internet to do research. Digital research differs from Internet research in that digital researchers use the Internet as a research tool rather than the Internet itself as the subject of study. A digital researcher seeks knowledge as part of a systematic investigation with the specific intent of publishing research findings in an online open access journal or by other social media information exchange formats.
An online interview is an online research method conducted using computer-mediated communication (CMC), such as instant messaging, email, or video. Online interviews require different ethical considerations, sampling and rapport than practices found in traditional face-to-face (F2F) interviews. Online interviews are separated into synchronous online interviews, for example via online chat which happen in 'real time' online and asynchronous online interviews, for example via email conducted in non-real time. Some authors discuss online interviews in relation to online focus groups whereas others look at online interviews as separate research methods. This article will only discuss online interviews.
An interview in qualitative research is a conversation where questions are asked to elicit information. The interviewer is usually a professional or paid researcher, sometimes trained, who poses questions to the interviewee, in an alternating series of usually brief questions and answers. They can be contrasted with focus groups in which an interviewer questions a group of people and observes the resulting conversation between interviewees, or surveys which are more anonymous and limit respondents to a range of predetermined answer choices. In addition, there are special considerations when interviewing children. In phenomenological or ethnographic research, interviews are used to uncover the meanings of central themes in the life world of the subjects from their own point of view.
Arthur P. Bochner is an American communication scholar known for his research and teaching on intimate relationships, qualitative inquiry, narrative, and autoethnography. He holds the rank of Distinguished University Professor at the University of South Florida. Bochner is the former President of the National Communication Association and former Vice-President of the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. Among his publications are two books, two edited collections, and more than 100 book articles, chapters, and essays on communication theory, family and interpersonal communication, love and marriage, and the philosophies and methodologies of the human sciences, especially narrative inquiry and autoethnography.
Janice Margaret Morse in Blackburn, Lancs., UK to New Zealand parents. She is an anthropologist and nurse researcher who is best known as the founder and chief proponent of the field of qualitative health research. She has taught in the United States and Canada. She received PhDs in transcultural nursing and in anthropology at the University of Utah, where she later held the Ida May “Dotty” Barnes and D Keith Barnes Presidential Endowed Chair in the College of Nursing at University of Utah,. She is also an Emerita Distinguished Professor at the University of Utah and Professor Emerita at the University of Alberta. She is founder of three journals and created four scholarly book series on qualitative research. She was Founding Director of the International Institute of Qualitative Methodology at University of Alberta, the longest standing research institute on qualitative inquiry in the world.
Art-based research is a mode of formal qualitative inquiry that uses artistic processes in order to understand and articulate the subjectivity of human experience.
Dorothy Jean Clandinin is a Canadian scholar known for her contributions to educational research and narrative inquiry. She is professor emerita and the founding director of the Centre for Research for Teacher Education and Development at the University of Alberta. Clandinin previously served as the vice president of Division B of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
