Old methods and new technologies: Social media and shifts in power in qualitative research

Abstract

This article explores how online communications and social networking sites raise new ethical and methodological questions for qualitative researchers who design studies to be primarily ‘off-line’. The author explores how social media affect efforts to recruit participants, gain informed consent, collect data, leave the field, and disseminate results, particularly as participants have greater ability to respond to those findings. In examining the dilemmas ethnographers increasingly encounter, this article points to the shifts of power between participants and researchers and suggests that this might promise greater equity between participants and researchers, while also potentially introducing new pitfalls.