Digital Research Challenges

Digital Research Challenges
Virgil Stoian
With the rise of the digital era and with its potential to open new directions in
ethnography, there can be little doubt that the Internet has provided social researchers
with great opportunities for a more in-depth approach towards the desired field of
investigation. Despite all these, as Murthy (2008) suggests, their infiltration into popular
research methods represents a small part of the overall research compared to the online
scholarly portals used for research. In this essay, I am going to talk about the challenges
which sociologists face when they base their research on digital documents and analyse the
way in which these challenges can be addressed whilst ensuring the data collected is valid
and reliable.
As Bryman (2012) states, websites and web pages are a potential source of data
themselves and can be regarded as potential material for both qualitative and quantitative
analysis. The four new technologies which enable sociologists to collect their data are,
according to Murthy (2008) online questionnaires, websites, blogs, digital video and social
networking; they pose, by the way, an important question regarding their validity and
reliability, as not everything which is displayed on the virtual environment is actually
sociologically valid.
Despite the fact that today, video-recording and photographing are perceived as techniques
of researching, in the second half of the 20th century, these innovations seemed unreliable.
As Elliot Freidson observed, in the 1950’s, the use of a tape recorder research wise was
mocked (Lee, 2004). Later on, Howard Becker (1974) argued that the pictures which the
anthropologists take for research purposes are not much different from the ones they
usually take on their holidays or what other people take in their vacations. However,
according to Murthy (2008), Becker was one of the first sociologists to make practical use
of tape recording in the early 1950s. Furthermore, some of the sociologists who took up
photography years ago are today reluctant towards the use of video streams or research
“blogs” in their research.
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As Murthy (2008: 4) suggests, ‘the presence of ethnographers in a virtual field site is often
physically “invisible”’, or as what Ebo (1998: 3) calls, ‘cyberstealth’, as they read web blogs
and take anonymous web ‘avatars’ in chat rooms of forums. Even if the internet and its
domains want to project an image of neutrality, these are, in essence, spaces where power
relations are developed, most often from the interactions of the virtual incarnations of
racist or homophobic moderators or blog owners with the persons which post comments,
as Murthy (2008) describes. Due to this situation, Dicks et al (2005:128) draw attention to
the fact that the Internet should never be treated as being a ‘neutral’ observation space, as
it always remains a domain where a researcher’s data and analysis are always filled with
personal histories, social norms and agendas. As a consequence, the role of observer can
still be considered “passive” from the bloggers’ and chat room users’ point of view if the
researcher is not openly expressing his or her goal in their interactions with the other
users of the virtual environment. This situation raises some ethical questions regarding the
covert electronic research. One example is Denzin (1999), and he admits that during his
research, he was passively observing other players without asking their permission for this
nor for the use of their postings as quotations. But as all the researchers agree, they have to
consider the act of lurking and its implications as a part of the electronic social research, as
Richman (2007) suggests.
From the situations described above, it is clear that there are many problems arising from
the ethics of new media-driven research. However, Murthy (2008) implies that there are
some researchers which offer support and guidelines towards the correct social
observation of the Internet, such as Bruckman’s (2002: 21-30) thoughts on ‘Human
Subjects Research on the Internet’, Sharf’s (1999) “Ethics of Doing Naturalistic Discourse
Research on the Internet” and Schrum’s (1995) “Guidelines for Ethical Electronic
Research”, which respond to many of the questions raised by the online research, such as
issues of privacy, online pseudonyms, documentation and informed consent and many
other related social research topics. Murthy (2008) encourages internet researchers to use
Schrum’s (1995) example, which gives a very good set of ethical guidelines towards
research, such as treating e-mail correspondence as private unless otherwise agreed and
consider themselves as having an “obligation” towards the electronic communities they are
conducting their researching on.
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Another question is raised by the technique of “harvesting”, as Sharf (1999) explains, which
is skimming data from online lists, chatrooms, newsgroups and other such environments
without the express consent of the users and moderators. Despite the fact that this practice
is not forbidden by any law, there are few researchers who are convinced that moderators,
bloggers and chatrooms and newsgroups will be comfortable to being subjected to covert
observation or their statements being cited and reproduced in any qualitatively
environment such as journals, books and newspapers. As Murthy (2008) suggests, one of
the aspects that all three researchers, Bruckman (2002), Schrum (1995) and Sharf (1999)
agree, is the ethical approach towards the research of the vulnerable and marginalized
groups. In this context, Sharf’s (1999) suggestion is that researchers should take into
consideration the potential harms, such as conflicts with the online group and the benefits
for the group, like its legitimacy.
The first digital research method which I examine is the online questionnaires. As Murthy
(2008) explains, researchers who wanted to use an online questionnaire on a selected
group of people in the 1990s had no other choice but design and program the
questionnaire themselves from scratch. As a comparison, today, there is a wide variety of
affordable online templates and hosting services which provide a firm and reliable support
for the researchers to conduct their questionnaires on, services like “Zoomerang” and
“SurveyMonkey”. Once the data are collected from the respondents, these online services
can then export the results to SPSS or any other quantitative analysis package which will
allow them to work with all the data, so they can categorise it in any way they want. Murthy
(2008) goes on saying that after this, all the resulted data can be stored in a Microsoft Word
document or any other text processing software which will grant them instant access
without any need for transcription. The major advantages of the online questionnaires is
the huge number of respondents that the researcher can work with, as Murthy (2008)
suggests that the numbers are beyond 20,000 participants and the cost attached to this
type of research is modest, compared with the traditional survey research methods as
Brewer and Hunter (2006) exemplify, and the ease of implementing modifications at a
latter stage to the questionnaires, such structuring responses, adapting questions and
point-and-click responses technique, illustrated by Van Selm and Jankowski (2006).
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Another aspect which gives the online research questionnaires and advantage over the
classical questionnaires is that respondent frequently e-mails the online questionnaires to
his friends and co-workers, as Murthy (2008) observed, gathering even more information,
which may further be used or discarded, depending on the researcher’s needs.
Furthermore, respondents are more likely to respond to more “intimate” questions online
compared to when they are talking face-to-face with the researcher, as Miller and Slater
(2000) confirm.
There are also downsides attached to the Internet research. For example, as Bryman
(2012) explains, Clegg Smith (2004) found an e-mail-based distribution list or, for short,
listserv, on which General Practitioners in the National Health Service posted their views
regarding the organisational changes in the service. This listserv notified all participants
that ‘members are advised to consider comments posted to lists to be in the public domain’.
Due to the fact that there are very large numbers of comments posted, many of these
comments may come from users who are no longer active participants, so finding them and
asking for their consent to use their comments for research can be very difficult or even
impossible. Furthermore, there is great concern regarding the principle of protecting the
respondents from harm. As Stewart and Williams (2005) suggest, complete protection
anonymity is nearly impossible to maintain in Internet researching due to the fact that the
computer generates information about its identity which can often be found in the header
and which is very difficult to remove.
The data protection is another concerning aspect. DeLorme et al (2001) explains that the
Internet raises the question of the security under which the data is kept, as it is very
difficult to know who can access the information apart from the researcher. He gives the
example of a message posted on an Internet discussion group that can be accessed by
anyone who can use the web. Furthermore, due to the fact that some websites allow
“lurkers”, which are people who can monitor the activity on a website without letting
anyone know they are there, these environments make it difficult for the researcher to
secure the confidentiality of the data they collected, if there are users who can identify
identities despite the researcher’s effort to conceal them.
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An important problem related to the online surveys is the sampling. As Bryman (2012)
explains, a researcher will set its sampling frame from which he will then select his sample,
or the number of individuals whose responses he needs for the project. A sample is the
segment of the population which is selected for investigation. This sample represents only
a small number of the population. Once the researcher has finished sampling, he can than
send the online questionnaires to the respondents to complete them. But there are some
issues which can affect the sampling. For example, as Bryman (2012) suggests, a major
issue is that not everyone on Earth is online and has the necessary technical knowledge to
complete an online questionnaire in either email or Web formats.
Furthermore, there many other issues which affect sampling for an online project. One
example can be found in the case in which a respondent has multiple e-mail addresses. This
can happen as people often pass their work e-mail addresses as they do not want to be
disturbed on their private online addresses. Moreover, individuals may have several
Internet providers which make it hard for the researcher to keep track of the actual
number of respondents. Another challenge is illustrated through the fact that in any given
household, there may be more than one user who share the same computer. One other
sampling issue can be the public towards the Internet is addressed. According to Couper
(2000), the Internet-users are a biased sample of the population, as they tend to be better
educated, younger, wealthier and they often do not represent the ethnic or religious
minorities the researchers are looking for.
Another problem regarding the digital documents for researching is that these can often be
subjected to re-editing without the researcher being notified of this, and as a consequence,
the facts he used from that particular source can no longer be valid and reliable. As Platt
(1981), Burgess (1984) and Scott (1990) suggest, it is vital that a document can be
confirmed as being authentic. Langlois and Seignobos (1908) explain that in order for a
copy to be of some value at all, the text must not be corrupted and altered in transmission.
According to Allen-Robertson (2013), when dealing with digital documents on the Internet,
if we analyse the true technical sense of a document, we realise that everything that
circulates on the Web is actually a copy of a copy. In fact, the process of data transferring
from the source to the user’s screen involves copying, for multiple times, across multiple
spaces for multiple web platforms multiple copies. If in the daily practice such an
occurrence would not be considered an issue and we take for granted that what has been
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copied is an 100% replica of the original, on the Internet, the situation changes. The simple
act of changing the document’s original file format or simply hosting it in a different
archival system can significantly alter it. On the World Wide Web, and under such
circumstances, nothing can guarantee that the digital document read now has the same
content and meaning as when it was produced and dated as such.
In this digital era that we leave in, documents are subjected to corrections, alterations or
even complete rewrites, and there is the possibility that notifications regarding the
modifications of the online documents may not be available for the researcher.
Other aspects of online researching which pose a challenge to the researcher are from the
present history, which is history that is occurring as the research takes place, and can be
described as “internet echoes”, according to Allen-Robertson (2013). It is often for a story
to appear on one site and other sites report it as well, with slight variations added from one
site to another. Despite this, some editors may add other information to the initial report,
such as interviews, or any other further information, which the first report did not contain.
This means that if a story is taken and edited on an x number of websites, it will have an x
number of variants.
To conclude, the digital tools like online and e-mail based questionnaires have proved to be
of real help for researchers, as they imply a substantially reduced cost and time consume
compared to the traditional post questionnaires, but in the same time, the virtual
environment has some well hidden problems which question the quality and originality of
many sources, due to the personal views and judgement expressed by the editors in their
work.
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