New Media New Society?

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DOI :10.26650/B/SS07SS49.2023.009.08   IUP :10.26650/B/SS07SS49.2023.009.08    Full Text (PDF)

New Qualitative Methodologies in Virtual Ethnographies: Flash Surveys, Images, and Built-in Translators

Stephen Carradını, Anya Hommadova Lu

Virtual ethnography extends traditional ethnography into persistent online digital worlds. Scholars have researched the changes in techniques, tools, and ethics that come with a shift from physical spaces to digital spaces and have found new approaches to offer new insights into the researched communities and new tools to allow new types of data to be collected. Questions surrounding participant-observation have become more complex as well. We offer explanations of one approach (screenshot collection) and two tools (flash surveys, built-in translators) as contemporary innovations in virtual ethnography. We have found that flash surveys can leverage the frequent presence of people in the mobile persistent world so as to allow data to be quickly acquired. These flash surveys are limited by social conditions that require the surveys to be very short, so as to not disrupt the social fabric by asking too many questions at a time. Screen captures (still and video) allow the researcher to unobtrusively record the data from real interactions and experiences in real time, but the researcher must also must carefully handle the intimate data that people share in disinhibited online spaces with close friends with whom they play the game. Built-in translators offer the ability for those who don’t speak the same language to form social bonds, but the possibility of misunderstandings due to inaccurate translation also exists. We argue that new media drives new societies in mobile virtual worlds, as the technology precedes and shapes the communities that exist in the mobile virtual worlds. Thus, tools and approaches must be continuously adapted to study these new societies.


Keywords: Virtual ethnography, Qualitative research, Methods, Surveys, Translation

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