[Air-l] qualitative analysis of discussion board postings

[Drew Ross]

Ulrike,

I did very similar work (and had no trouble with gaining permission at
Oxford University-- my sense is that it is much easier to do social science
research in countries less litigious than the good old USA). If you're
interested in having a conversation about my grounded theory analysis, I'd
be happy to do that. I can also send you a copy of articles I've written on
this (my PhD work).

All the best,

Drew Ross
Visiting Research Fellow
Oxford University
OUDES, Department of Educational Studies



On 8/8/06, Charlie Balch <charlie at balch.org> wrote:
>
> 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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