The research project for our class is ethnographic research, a form of qualitative research in which you study a community and its practices and behaviors in order to understand something elusive or problematic about its culture. By now you’ve begun collecting primary research data in the form of “field notes,” observations you’re making about anything and everything that might have a lick of importance to a research project. You obviously don’t have a claim yet; you’ll eventually formulate one by examining your field notes for patterns, a little like we’ve done all semester: look for patterns, articulate what the pattern is, and

But first, a few things to help ground you in this unit.

Nonparticipant observation is what we’ve been doing all along: observing a community without contributing to it ourselves. (Participant observation is when you are an active member, or when you request interviews with fellow participants, which requires ethical review of your work.) Nonparticipant observation is ethical in this case only because all posts are occurring in a public, searchable forum, with members using pseudonyms. Thus, members don’t have the same expectations of privacy that members of a private, invite-only forum might have. Still, you should be ethical in your approach: don’t try to reveal anything unnecessary about community members; don’t impose your own beliefs or values on their culture; don’t speak for them if what you’re claiming can’t be found in the data; and, if you’re using a post that seems like it could harm the poster, you may want to anonymize the data even further.

A virtual ethnography like the one we’re doing gives you a record of text-based dialogue, but you should also observe other aspects of behavior and identity when they’re disclosed, including but not limited to:

  • Number of members in the community
  • Identity factors like age, gender/pronouns, race, class, sexuality, religion
  • Geographical locations or region-specific affiliations (like universities, workplaces, landmarks)
  • Common beliefs espoused by members that indicate a particular attitude or disposition
  • Ways that the online forum creates hierarchy and structures interaction (e.g., loss of social cues, use of emoji, use of Internet snark, the fact that the Internet doesn’t forget)
  • Number of comments
  • Popularity of posts and replies as indicated in upvotes

And, while it might sound strange at first, think about what is not being said. You can usually tell a lot about a conversation and the people having it by the silences as well as the content.

This blog post (not mine!) speaks specifically to doing an ethnography on Reddit.

In your Field Notes, you’ll jot down observations of identity factors, exchanges, quotes, contexts for discussion, number of upvotes and replies, and so on. When you write your paper, you’ll look at these notes and extract a claim about patterns of behavior, identity, attitude, power and hierarchy, or some other aspect you notice. This will be your primary data. You’ll interpret it yourself, and use secondary research—journal articles or book chapters found through library databases—to explore and support your claim.

This is a social science paper, and so it will be written up with headings. Refer to the Assignment Guidelines for the specific heading names and what information should be placed under which heading. Some students have found it helpful to think of this style of writing as similar to a lab report. It seems like a rigid format, but consider this practice for other qualitative research papers you’ll write in your college career!