ABSTRACT
In an era where ‘new media’ is no longer that ‘new’ and where digital technologies are integrated into everyday existence, it seems a little stale to ask if we, as qualitative researchers, will use the Internet in our work. The better question is ‘how will our use of the Internet inform our work and what will it change?’ Will we, as Earl and Kimport (2011) advocate, learn to leverage the technological affordances of the net? Or will we use new technologies to do the same old thing thereby ‘backing into the future’ (Meikle, 2002, p. 143)? This chapter will address these questions providing first, an overview of how the Internet is currently being used in qualitative sport studies and, second, identifying that research that challenges us to consider what new methods are made possible by new media. Using examples from the fields of sport and exercise, it will explore how the way we talk about the Web has shaped our thinking about the possibilities of the technologies and subsequently informed how digital qualitative methods have been integrated into research practice. It will compare and contrast those digital qualitative methods that extend the reach of projects, enabling researchers to do more with less, to other methods that fundamentally change the type of qualitative research possible and imaginable.
