ABSTRACT
This chapter draws on the findings of the herper community case study to illustrate how quantitative methods are sensitised to the community under study. The appeal of conducting empirical research within a community study is in the identification of a discrete research population that is self-defined and real world. A pivotal factor in the methodological decisions made was the key role of the Internet in the concept of a social ecology and within the case study population. The questions relevant to a discussion of trust where drawn from the social capital literature and sought to measure the presence of social cohesion through establishing the levels of general and interpersonal trust and reciprocity evident in the respondent population. The literature on e-voting highlights a key concern of online surveying: that one cannot control the influence of the environment in which a person completes the survey.
