Application of netnography in practice: Steps of research and case study

Watch this netnography “movie” that describes the different steps of netnography:

Case study

Most, if not all, students have to learn at least one foreign language at almost all levels of education. Usually, students do so in their classroom, forming a language learning community with their classmates. In a classroom, students are usually instructed by a teacher and learn from textbooks, at given times each week. But language learning communities exist online as well, and in fact there is a growing number of such communities. The members are globally distributed people, who are interested in language learning and teaching. A researcher may wonder how such communities learn together, what kind of shared values they have that bonds them together into a community, and what are the online interactions that community members participate in.

These formulated questions are in fact how we identify gaps in our understanding that are worth pursuing as a research project. In our case, the research goal is the study of interactions and learning that occurs in these online communities. Considering that we are interested in understanding Internet-based interactions, netnographic research is particularly suitable as a research method.

Having decided on the research topic, the next step is entering the field, which necessitates overcoming certain challenges; namely, the researcher must decide which field site to study (e.g., which online group or online platform), what data to collect (textual or non-textual, at what timeframe, etc.), what technology to use, how to delineate the boundaries of the field, and, importantly, how to balance active participation and visibility during netnographic observation.

To plan this research, the earlier introduced (Figure 1) 6-step process proposed by Kozinets (2010) is particularly useful to understand the stages of conducting this research. The steps are described below in detail:

Step 1: Research planning

The initial step before starting any research is conducting a thorough literature review. Students should spend time understanding the knowledge that academic and non-academic studies have gathered so far about their topic of interest. This way, students will be able to “join the conversation” with their research study, situating their findings in a larger debate. In our case, since we are interested in the topic of language teaching communities, it is useful to conduct research about the history online language teaching communities, as well as technologies and methods used. This understanding is necessary to engage with the topic academically. Moreover, it is important to identifying the added value to the understanding of the topic that netnography may bring. Perhaps no other study used a netnographic research method to discuss this topic before, making our study truly unique.

Step 2: Entre

Having familiarized with the research topic, students should have an understanding about gaps in the literature, preferably formulate criticism of existing studies and identify areas that are of particular interest for them. For example, if our initial literature review revealed that there is significant amount of research about the history and membership of online language communities, but we know little about how activities and interactions that happen within these communities shape shared practices (and shared values), we can formulate the following questions:

• What are the main activities (and the artifacts and resources related to these activities) carried out by online language teaching communities that help develop their shared practice?
• How are these activities organized?
• What are the characteristics of these artifacts, activities, and resources?
• Through what forms of engagement do members of online language teaching communities develop their shared practice?
• In what ways does their membership status (newcomer vs. long-term member) play a role in the ways they engage in the community and its shared practice?
• How are new members introduced to shared practice?
• How do they become part of this online community of practice? (Kulavuz-Onal 2015: 434)

Having formulated these questions, students must think about what online group or site of interaction to study. It is important to consider the constraints of the research (available timeframe, available resources, deadlines etc.) to set certain realistic limitations for research. The research conducted as the initial step should also help with identifying some groups and sites of interest. In our case, for example, we might choose to study one online community in particular: Webheads in Action (WiA). It is advisable to formulate a reason for identifying a certain group in order to justify our selection. Such reasons might be: the group is representative, it is the most significant group, it is the oldest group, etc.

In our case study, the author has provided the following justification: “The uniqueness of this community [WiA] lies in the facts that it is distributed over multiple sites instead of functioning over a single site, that it has been around since 2002, and that it shows a bottom-up emergence process from a group to a community of practice… The Webheads in Action online community has been growing since 2002” (Kulavuz-Onal 2015: 433)

Step 3: Data Collection:

The next important step, after conducting literature review, narrowing down the research question and choosing a group or site to study, is deciding about forms of data collection. Students should decide what kind of data they choose to collect and how. As earlier mentioned, data can be textual (blogs, written conversations, etc.) or non-textual (e.g., visual, audio, video, etc.). The choice may depend on the types of interactions that are important for the study and that are happening within the chosen group.

Then, students decide whether they want to actively participate or be passive observers (see earlier discussion). Students may want to conduct online interviews and take fieldnotes regularly. It is also advisable that students set a timeframe for their study and clearly define when research observations began and when they ended. Students should keep in mind that their choice of data collection should also be informed by ethical standards, that are described later, as well as in a separate Module.

In our case study, the form of data collection was participatory (active) netnography and the duration was one year. During this time, the researcher visited the online spaces of the community, observed (through following events and conversations online) and participated in selected synchronous and asynchronous activities of the community, interviewed key members of the community (with a variety of backgrounds and experiences) mainly via Skype, and archived relevant documents to support interviews and fieldnotes (with informed consent of interview participants).

Also, the researcher took reflective observational fieldnotes (by taking notes on what the researcher saw on the screen, interpreting the events and recording observations in fieldnotes) about experiences as a participant in the main activities, observations of participants’ interactions, their experiences of these activities, and some of the community’s artifacts available on the internet. While in the field, the researcher also set boundaries and limitations to the scope of research (these boundaries will be contingent on researcher’s time and resources available to conduct research, as well as reliable internet access): with myriad of data available about the history of the community, the research was limited to researching main activities happening concurrently during my fieldwork. The main activities were determined ahead of time (it can be defined based on the number of occurrences or number of participant members in these events). Engaging in activities marked field entrance. During participant observations (attending online events), the researcher did not dominate any conversations and avoided becoming an insider (staying a “moderate level participant”), in order to keep an outsider’s perspective. The researcher left and re-enter the field on multiple occasions because the nature of online fieldwork is shaped around internet access.

Step 4: Interpretation

How data is interpreted may depend on what kind of data is gathered, the quality of data and possible biases in data collection. Each module on primary data collection discusses interpretation of gathered data, which should be reviewed by students who choose to use any of those data gathering tools of their netnographic research (.e.g, observation, fieldwork, interviews). Most importantly, at this step students need to decide on the classification, coding and contextualization of their data (again, in accordance with ethical considerations). More specifically, for classification and coding students should choose logical ways of classifying their data into categories, assigning names and labels to categories (these labels should emerge from the data itself) (Addeo et al. 2020). For contextualization, students are advised to contextualize the meaning of various terms and phenomena relevant for people under investigation, rather than only considering the objective meaning.

To return to our case study, the researcher gained experience from the perspective of both, asynchronous and a synchronous participant, by sometimes participating in the events (synchronous), and in other times watching the recording (asynchronous). The researcher took notes of textual data and non-textual data, recorded and transcribed all the interviews, archived selective data (screenshots of interfaces, email interactions etc). For data analysis, the researcher employed coding and content analysis.

Step 5: Ethical Standards

In general, ethical considerations that apply to any academic research must be consulted by students (included in a separate Module). All ethical standards apply to netnographic research as well, especially concerning informed consent and data storage. Students should always be mindful of the well-being of their informants and seek ethical approval if needed (sometimes they must) from their institutions. All relevant ethical guidelines should be closely followed when designing and conducted netnography, as well as at the stage of data interpretations.

To illustrate how informed consent and other ethical considerations can be implemented during netnography, we return to our case study: before beginning fieldwork, the researcher decided to prepare a website to share their research with the community, which served as a source of information that community members can visit at any time during research. On this website, the researcher gave details about the research itself, as well as to disclosed their identity as a researcher. With that, the purpose of participation in activities was clearly described as an academic engagement for data collecting purposes, and there was no deceit towards the online community being studied.

Of course there are many situations and conditions in which researchers attempt to collect data; for ethical considerations and ways to obtain informed consent students are encouraged to discuss this issue with their teachers before they conduct research, as well as consult the earlier mentioned Module on ethical considerations. Many universities require a “Human Subjects Research Training” in order to provide the necessary skills and ethical preparation to students when conducting fieldwork with “human subjects”.