ABSTRACT
Understanding how mentoring through Facebook impacts upon others, particularly when using the early childhood forums, is not an easy task and includes complexities in selecting and exploring the plethora of threads and posts educators make every day, every hour and every minute. A calculation of this is almost immeasurable without privileged access to metadata. However, such access may not be relevant particularly considering that one profound or targeted comment could impact upon a member more significantly then 10 seemingly irrelevant comments. It is therefore not the number of posts that are made (although the topic of the conversation and nature of communication can surely influence this), but what is actually communicated in these comments and how it is communicated, that draw out the important findings for this research. This chapter, therefore discusses the methods of phenomenology that were used in the overall study as well as the specific description of ‘phase one’ data collection of the study that this monograph explicitly addresses. It incorporates a strong explanation as to why this research uses a phenomenological approach, including how the Facebook discussions were analysed thematically and used to inform the subsequent stages of data collection.
