Internet Inquiry - Question Six

Chapter Summary: Internet Inquiry, Question 6

Baym, who is one of the editors of the book, concludes the book with a summary of each chapter and her own synthesis of the material and issues covered.
Her concern is with the overarching consideration of “quality” as it is framed within internet research and more generally in any kind of research.
She initializes the dialog by stating, “doing qualitative research well is a matter of finding practical and defensible balancing points between opposing tensions”. She then offers some guidelines for conducting good research, referring to the examples within the book.
This idea of balancing tension is explored in great detail. She suggests researchers employ a dialectic approach, as this method allows one to approach relationships as a dynamic process. In this framework she indicates that the goal of qualitative research is “not to catalog the definitive set of contractions in personal relationships but to understand… how couples deal with dialectical tensions”. The importance is placed on understanding processes for dealing with these tensions.

She sets up the dialogic approach with a series of “methodological dialectics”:
1. Rigor and imagination
2. Fact and value
3. Precision and richness
4. Elegance and applicability
5. Vivification and verification

Baym then reviews the dialectics that are attended to in the book:
1. Tidiness and messiness
2. Depth and breadth
3. Local and global
4. Risk and comfort

Some general points she makes:
With regard to depth and breadth she indicates that one has no choice but to bound a project, create tidy interpretations of a modest slice of the field bypassing other interesting avenues along the way. Generalizability is neither relevant nor possible. She claims that it more important that one can offer analyses that can be coordinated with others. With regards to comfort she says, “Intellectual benefits are often accrued through taking practical, intellectual, logistical and emotional risks”.

Baym then discusses the very possibility of whether there can even be standards for quality in a worked of multiple social meanings. And then makes some concrete recommendations.

Baym revisits what we have been noticing in all of our class discussion, with the reduction of the analyses always settling into a solid statement of “it depends”. However she does take great pains to clarify that just because there “are no right or wrong methods” does not mean that all research is equally as useful or relevant. She bemoans the condition within which researchers struggle that has resulted in the foundations of methodology becoming so unstable that the rigor and value of the research is open to challenge by critics.

In a climate where judgment criteria are always open to reinterpretation Baym argues that there are still strategies that yield better or worse results. She states that just because “there is no direct access to truth does not mean that all studies are equally compelling”

Baym lays out a list of criteria that she believes contribute to successful internet studies:
1. Grounded in theory and data
2. Demonstrate rigor in data collection and analysis
3. Use multiple strategies to collect data
4. Takes into account perspective of participants
5. Demonstrates awareness and self-reflexivity regarding process
6. Considers interconnectiveness between internet and “life-world”

Baym then lays out a concrete explicit program that includes:

1. Connect to History
2. Focus
3. Be Practical
4. Anticipate Counter-Arguments

• a. Problematize Core Concepts
• b. Listen to Participants
• c. Attend to Context
• d. Attend to Yourself
• e. Seek Contrasts in the Data
• f. Limit your Claims
• g. Document your Research Process
• h. Frame the Study for Diverse Readers

5. Develop Compelling Explanations

Baym concludes by restating the aim of qualitative research being “not to find a single explanatory element but to reveal the complexity of our subject.” She returns to her claim that qualitative internet research should be considered as a process of managing dialectical tensions. In so doing we create the possibility of adding a thorough, grounded, trustworthy voice that adds to a meaningful conversation, and that others can build on.

Questions:

1. Is the dialectical framework that Baym suggests too simplistic, flat and 2-dimensional?
2. Is Baym’s list of criteria appropriate for a study that hopes to question methodological convention?
3. Does the pre-emptive practice of preparing for criticism of one’s methodology place the researcher in an unnecessarily defensive position and begin to alter the nature of the inquiry (i.e. structuring the questions so as to make them more defendable?)