ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the methods of qualitative research with reference to Internet prosumer environments. Prosumption, being the combination of consumer activity and the common creating the content, may be treated as a specific field of research on the organization of work. This phenomenon began to gain in strength in the first decade of the twenty-first century, yet the analysis of the prosumer collectivities was based on quantitative research. By contrast, the qualitative methods, including the netnographic ones, often focused on the areas in which the problems connected with the work organization were of less importance. Since Wikimedia projects are unique places on the Internet, which gather unprofessional knowledge workers, a considerable part of the chapter was dedicated to the research of these projects. The described research strategies relate to the ways of collecting the existing data and the induced data as well as to the problem of the involvement of a researcher in the life of the researched collectivities.
