ABSTRACT
This chapter explains how methodological adaptions developed during a research project that used Facebook status updates as data. It discusses an approach new to digital scholarship. Phenomenography is a boutique research approach that is usually situated in education research in order to inform classroom practice. The chapter weighs into the debate by arguing that with a few adaptions, phenomenography could be both sociological and become a valuable tool for digital research. It explains how the idea of phenomenography being non-dualist and participant-oriented begins to address the ethical problems of authenticity and reliability sorely needed in digital research. The chapter argues that going online provides an alternative way to approach problems inherent in the highly criticized phenomenographic interview. It describes the phenomenographic techniques to analyse online artefacts. The chapter proposes that by looking at ways to adapt phenomenography to work better for what a researcher is looking to discover, a way that phenomenographers can breach their tribal borders can be found.
