In order to address my central research topic, ‗An analysis of a pre-election discussion on a Facebook newsgroup entitled Help us stop Jacob Zuma from becoming South Africa‟s next President, exploring issues of South Africanness and the potential of the new media for democratic expression‘, qualitative research methods are the most appropriate since a descriptive, rather than analytical, approach ―…give(s) the reader a feel for particular people and events in concrete social settings‖ (Neuman, 1997: 328).
Since the text consists of a transcript collected from a Facebook newsgroup during the election period, the online space for this discussion can be considered in the light of a corresponding postmodern ―concrete social setting‖ (ibid: 1997: 328). While the medium itself is by nature disembodied and the participants are remotely accessing the page from as far away as the United Kingdom, the newsgroup text is distinctly linked to actual unfolding political events in South Africa and respondents are discussing these issues in an environment that has a convention of named identities. This also locates my research within the critical realist perspective, since it is situated in this particular socio-cultural and political context.
Kelly (2002) explains that qualitative methodology represents a turn in research epistemology towards the ‗contextual‘: ―research which is less immediately concerned with discovering universal, law-like patterns of human behaviour… and is more concerned with making sense of human experience from within the context and
perspective of human experience‖ (Kelly, 2002, in Terre Blanche and Durrheim, 2002:
398).
Qualitative research is often perceived as being split into two schools of thought, i.e. the interpretive approach and the social constructionist approach, which can be described as empathetic and sceptical approaches respectively. Kelly (2002) rejects the complete separation of these approaches, and terms both ‗interpretive research‘, suggesting that this general method, according to its research application, tends towards either the
‗sceptical‘ or ‗empathetic‘ side of the ―fundamental interpretive continuum‖ (ibid: 399), but can rarely be exclusively classified as one or the other.
The exploration of these discussions can be seen as operating within the transcendent perspective, since the research does not impose questions on the respondents, but rather explores the perceptions put forward by contributors themselves. Neuman (1997: 330) writes of the transcendent perspective that ―It‘s goal is … to treat people as creative, compassionate living beings, not as objects‖. In the study of South Africanness and new, more inclusive ways of understanding citizenship, this attitude to the text is perhaps more democratic than an approach that presumes to dictate to research subjects through
questioning to elicit responses. This is reflected also in the terms used in the respective branches of inquiry to refer to the people whose responses are the basis of the research.
While other branches of research may refer to ‗human research subjects‘ or
‗respondents‘, transcendent research would more often use the terms ‗contributors‘ or
‗participants‘, which emphasises their autonomy.
With this conception of interpretive research, a textual exploration of this kind requires careful deciphering of the textual event at the levels of social/cultural context, discursive practice and language. The amount of data that is yielded by qualitative analysis has necessarily curtailed the amount of text to be analysed in this research.
While mixed methodology – that is, the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods – has many advantages for textual inquiries, this study exclusively deals with qualitative methods since the richness of cultural meanings to be obtained thus have more relevance than positivist findings to this particular research topic. Also this research is more
concerned with the relationships of discourses in the text and the subtle tensions between the online medium and the topics revealed in the contributors discussions, which is
necessarily a discursive practice. To act as a counter balance to the subjectivity embedded in the textual event and in the ethnographic approach to research, components of critical discourse analysis and distanciation, which take a more objective stance to the analysis of a text, have been applied. This serves as a form of triangulation of research methods, since the types of data yielded by each method will be different yet complimentary, to obtain a more well-rounded perspective in the analysis of the text.
Despite the relative newness of this field of research, a number of academics have contributed to the conception of online communities as tangible social places. Jones (1998) writes of ―virtual settlements‖, while the title of Rheingold‘s book The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (2000) hints at a parallel with this view. Other supporters of this position are Anderson (1992); Caputo (1992); Dutton (1998) (all in Nocera, 2002); and Burnett (2002).
The fact that such groups of ‗virtual‘ people (Bassett, 2002: 234) have been visualised in this way means that researchers can use similar research methods to those traditionally used in the study of physically existent communities. Ethnographic and hermeneutic research models in particular have been used in the context of new media communities.
The fact that the Facebook newsgroup can be seen as a virtual community on one hand, and on the other that the vast majority of contributors are South Africans (therefore
constituting a cultural and relative physical proximity of contributors) gives rise to a scenario that is particularly well suited to an adaptation of ethnographic research models.