Blogs in Social Research
Blogs are the quintessential early twenty-first century text blurring the boundary between private and public. In this chapter, we approach blogs as contemporary “documents of life” and offer our reflections on what blogs can offer social researchers base
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Nicholas Hookway and Helene Snee
Contents 1 Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Blogging and the Confessional Society . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Blogs as Documents of Life: Two Research Case Studies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Anonymity, Audiences, and Online Face-Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5 Data Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Data Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Conclusion and Future Directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Abstract
Blogs are the quintessential early twenty-first century text blurring the boundary between private and public. In this chapter, we approach blogs as contemporary “documents of life” and offer our reflections on what blogs can offer social researchers based on our own research experiences. Blogs offer rich first-person textual accounts of the everyday, but there are practical, methodological, and ethical issues involved in doing blog research. These include sampling, collecting, and analyzing blog data; issues of representation; and authenticity; whether blogs should be considered private or public, and if the people who create them are subjects or authors. The chapter also critically reflects on the methodological and ethical implications of the different decisions we made in our own research projects. We conclude that embracing new confessional N. Hookway (*) University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania, Australia e-mail: [email protected] H. Snee Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] # Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2019 P. Liamputtong (ed.), Handbook of Research Methods in Health Social Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5251-4_19
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N. Hookway and H. Snee
technologies like blogs can provide a powerful addition to the qualitative researcher’s toolkit and enable innovative research into the nature of contemporary selves, identities, and relationships. Keywords
Blogs · Documents · Online ethics · Online methods · Qualitative researc
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