[Air-l] qualitative analysis of discussion board postings

[Charlie Balch]

Ulrike,
Some very interesting research that you are taking on.

First, you might want to have a chat with your Institutional Review Board
(IRB). Even lurking on websites and collecting data may not be allowed.

Second there are some good programs for analyzing text. Atlis.ti and Nudist
come to mind (I hope I got those names correct - I am traveling).

Many qualitative text analysis methods break out into something like find
all the unique ideas/concepts, catagorize them, find where the categories
overlap/are not unique, find the ideas that don't fit in the schema. Repeat.
Spradley is a good example.

Other qualitative researches suggest that categories are an illusion and
suggest a more holistic understanding.

Your biggest challenge may be to combine empathy with online communication.
A number of researchers have found that online communication substantially
changes the way we communicate. People open up in ways that they would not
otherwise while the cues we use to understand traditional communication are
lost.

I'll be interested to hear how your research goes.
Charlie Balch
Arizona Western College

-----Original Message-----
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Ulrike Pfeil
Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 11:52 AM
To: air-l at listserv.aoir.org
Subject: SPAM-LOW: [Air-l] qualitative analysis of discussion board postings

Dear All
I am currently starting my PhD in the area of CMC. I am especially
interested in the phenomenon of empathy and how it manifests in online
communication. In my current study, I investigate message postings from a
(quite emotional) discussion board and through grounded theory came up with
a detailed categorisation scheme of the content. Apart from the basic
statistics with the codings, I would like to relate the patterns I found in
the online discussion board to the phenomenon of empathy in offline
communication. However, I struggle with the approach I should take. I have
read about different kinds of qualitative analysis (like thematic analysis,
discourse analysis and some parts of content analysis...) but I am not sure
how exactly to go about it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of
analysis (relation of coding results to general characteristics of a
phenomenon like empathy)  or can recommend literature that might help me? It
would not be a problem to write about it but I am searching for a more
"prescribed procedure". Does anybody know of similar studies? I also thought
about using word frequencies and concordances for the analysis - does
anybody have any recommendation concerning this? Any help would be greatly
appreciated!
Kind regards,
Ulrike
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