Choosing Among Qualitative Traditions
Qualitative research is an established form of inquiry that explores people’s experiences in their natural settings (Creswell, 1998). These traditions can be used in concert, as a researcher sees the need emerge, as a means to appropriately attend to the research question and the examined online space. This is not suggesting that existing traditions be abandoned or misappropriated. Rather, harkening back to Christine Hine’s (2013) discussion of researching online spaces, studying online meaning making can be challenging, and looking first to established traditions can help researchers appropriate the right methods for their studies. This book examines the core features of qualitative inquiry found in case study, ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology. However, this list of approaches is not exhaustive.
As Sharan B. Merriam (2009) aptly noted, other methodology scholars, such as Michael Quinn Patton (2002), John W. Creswell (2007), Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln (2005), and Renata Tesch (1990), have called attention to a variety of approaches. Their classifications, which include a range of five to forty-five approaches, thereby underscore that there is “no consensus” in categorizing qualitative inquiry (Merriam, 2009, p. 21). We do not intend to offer or recategorize traditions. Instead, this book provides options—namely, options for researchers to take an agentive stance and extend existing approaches beyond the boundaries of their existing constructs. Following the discussion of the four aforementioned qualitative traditions, this book addresses research paradigms that inform research approaches.
Qualitative Approaches
Qualitative research predates the advent of the Internet, and established traditions have been used to study online spaces. Scholars have found four key approaches—case study, ethnography, grounded theory, and phenomenology—to be helpful in examining and understanding the processes, products, and interactions inherent in learning in online spaces.
Case Study
Researchers select a case study approach when they are interested in examining a phenomenon that is bounded. That is, data collection would be limited to examining a defined aspect, be it a particular person (e.g., a student), a group of people (e.g., a classroom, a school), or a program (e.g., a coding workshop). It can extend to include sites of study, activities, or processes (Johnson & Christensen, 2014). Robert K. Yin (2014) explained:
The distinctive need for case study research arises out of the desire to understand complex social phenomena. In brief, case study allows investigators to focus on a “case” and retain a holistic and real world perspective—such as in studying individual life cycles, small group behavior, organizational and managerial processes, neighborhood change, school performance, international relations, and the maturation of industries. (p. 5)
Regardless of the focus of study, the case must fall within the bounded system that the researcher has defined.
According to Robert E. Stake (1995), there are three types of case studies. In intrinsic case studies the researcher attempts to understand a single case that is being studied, such as studying a particular student to better understand the strategies and methods that the particular student uses in learning processes. In instrumental case studies, researchers study cases to gain insight into issues that inform other situations and sites. For example, a researcher might study a student to better understand the impact of an innovative curriculum that has recently been implemented. The instrumental aspect is the area of interest, which is the impact of the curriculum, and the case of the student allows the researcher to dig into this question of importance. The collective case study, or multicase design (Yin, 2014), allows researchers to compare similarities and differences among cases in order to gain a more comprehensive understanding about a theory or issue. For example, the researcher may still have interest in understanding the impact of an innovative curriculum, but may choose to study several students and teachers simultaneously to address the question of the curriculum’s impact.
Researchers have conducted case study research to understand learning in online spaces (e.g., Glazer & Hergenrader, 2014). Rish’s (2014) instrumental case study of collaborative writing, digital cartography, and videogame design in a high school English classroom included classroom observations and student interviews. He analyzed the transmedia artifacts students created using programs such as AutoRealm, Terragan, and RPG Maker. Rish’s use of case study allowed him to explore trial and error within online learning and the role of transmedia resources in collaborative world building.
Ethnography
Ethnography focuses on understanding cultures and communities. It emerged out of the field of anthropology in the early twentieth century and means “writing about people” (Johnson & Christensen, 2008, p. 44). Ethnography aims to better understand the perspectives, attitudes, shared values, norms, practices, and interactions of a given group of people through rich, thick description (Geertz, 1973). As such, ethnography requires researchers to become participant observers, immersing themselves in a specific community context in order to collect data such as artifacts, interviews, and extensive field notes. In online spaces, researchers have conducted investigations in situ (e.g., Black, 2008; Ito et al., 2010; Lee, 2014), adapting ethnographic methods to engage in online and connective ethnography.
Online ethnography, also referred to as virtual ethnography (Hine, 2000) and netnography (Kozinets, 2009), is concerned with the data collection methods used to understand interactions within online spaces. Online data collection methods build on traditional ethnographic principles, which include a bricolage (Lévi-Strauss, 1962) of methods and tools that are continually refashioned and reworked to address the needs of the researcher.
Participant observation in online environments, whether through interactions with participants in massively multiplayer gaming worlds (Nardi, 2010; Steinkuehler, 2007), or interactions with participants in fanfiction communities (Magnifico, Curwood, & Lammers, 2015; Martin, et al. 2013), has become a central component within online ethnographic research. However, this kind of research also creates the need for researchers to better understand how to define the boundaries of a learning space. As explained further in Chapter Two, a field site for an online study can be both moving and porous, and researchers need to remain aware of these changes and be flexible in their approaches. The field site is dictated by the interactions among the individuals, the resources and tools that they use, and the social context of the learning situations.
Because of the importance of both online and offline spaces in people’s learning, many researchers have recognized that the online and offline worlds inform one another. Thus, researchers need to pay close attention to the intersections between worlds (Fields & Kafai, 2009; Leander, 2008; Leander & McKim, 2003). One way is through connective ethnography, which acknowledges the connection between online and offline practices and environments.
Kevin M. Leander (2008) explained that, stemming from Hine’s (2000) concept of virtual ethnography, connective ethnography is “a stance or orientation to Internet-related research that considers connections and relations as normative social practices and Intent social spaces as complexly connected to other social spaces” (p. 37). Examples include, but are not limited to, the study of instant messaging practices among adolescents (Jacobs, 2004) or the ways in which immigrant youth develop their literacy skills through their computer-mediated communication (Lam, 2000).
Grounded Theory
Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss (1967) introduced grounded theory to research actions, interactions, and social processes—areas where they felt that