Oldal 116 [116]
Part III. Digital Media and Storytelling in Research | 115
the digital environment as a natural social medium which allows for the
representation of the self and the interaction of users, thus allowing for
the study of identity constructs and behavior. Such research poses a major
methodological challenge for researchers, but despite its limitations, the
ethnographic approach has a number of advantages. The main advantage
of ethnographic research is that the data are easily accessible and are not
produced for research purposes, but are present in their natural environment.
While data mining seems simple, the data noice can be massive - due to
factors such as data feeds from artificial intelligence bots - and the researcher
has to expend considerable effort on data cleaning. At the same time, the
amount of data can vary from minute to minute, so the researcher is forced
to set a specific time period for the analysis. The resulting data corpus can be
huge and often requires the use of artificial intelligence software to analyze it.
Beyond the data collection, another challenge is the choice of the method
used to analyze the data. Netnography, that is, the study of content on the
Internet, cannot be considered a research method in itself, as it is always
determined by the research paradigm and the research objective that fits the
discipline. Sources can be approached from an anthropological paradigm
and used to explore cultural content and ritual behavioral patterns. Human
behavior can also investigated from a socio-psychological or even from an
economic perspective.
Braga (2021) suggests that face-to-face ethnographic research methods are
necessarily adaptable to an online environment. An example is participant
observation, which cannot be fully realized due to the time gap between the
publication of online content (e.g., writing a post or a comment) and the
researcher's reception of it, as the interactions are not taking place in real¬
time as in the case of face-to-face observation. However, one advantage is that
users’ online activities can be tracked using the logged data from platforms,
which allows the researcher to analyze the data quantitatively. However,
statistical correlations calculated from logged data may lead to biased results,
as participation in online platforms does not necessarily imply activity.
It can be concluded that content analysis is the ideal research method to
analyze the visual, verbal and audiovisual micro-narratives of the Internet.
In order to maintain the validity of the research, content analysis should
be coded using two independent coders and methodological triangulation
should be employed. Braga (2021) suggests the use of face-to-face interviews
to complement netnographic content analysis.
Bastiaensens et al. (2019) analyzed a chat stream of 937 chat posts from
online forums created by youth workers to support victims of cyberbullying.
The interactions were generated in their own natural medium and were not
research-related, so data bias was minimal. Participants posted anonymously
behind an avatar user profile. The conversation revealed patterns of bullying
on online platforms (e.g., blackmail with naked pictures, shaming public
posts with pictures and text, or hate speech messages), as well as coping