ABSTRACT

Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk is a comprehensive guide to analyzing digital interaction in formal and informal online spaces. The book establishes a new research framework for addressing major challenges that have arisen as social exchanges, meaning-making, and knowledge-building increasingly take place in social media, discussion forums, and online communities.

With a focus on methodological alignment to support valid and trustworthy knowledge claims, the authors present a series of design decisions to help researchers:

  • frame their object of interest and unpack underlying assumptions
  • understand key differences between researcher-influenced and pre-existing online talk
  • ethically extract and organize data for analysis
  • apply rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to answer their research questions

Written for scholars in education, business, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences, and beyond, this is a thorough approach to the research methods and concerns essential to the study of talk in online contexts.

chapter 1|13 pages

Why Investigate Online Talk?

Introducing the Research Design Framework

chapter 2|16 pages

What Are We Looking For?

Identifying the Object of Interest

chapter 3|13 pages

What Does Online Talk Represent?

Philosophical Assumptions and Methodological Alignment

chapter 4|33 pages

What is the Research Question and Approach?

Informing the Study Design from Prior Work

chapter 5|18 pages

When Can Online Talk be Treated as Data?

Ethical Practices

chapter 6|33 pages

How Will the Data be Acquired?

Characterizing, Bounding, and Extracting Online Talk as a Data Source

chapter 7|33 pages

How Will the Data be Analyzed?

Part One: Quantitative Approaches including Content Analysis, Statistical Modeling, and Computational Methods

chapter 8|37 pages

How Will the Data be Analyzed?

Part Two: Qualitative Approaches including Thematic, Narrative, Conversation, and Discourse Analysis

chapter 9|12 pages

Have We Found What We Were Looking For?

Revisiting the Research Design Framework