Internet Research Methods

The internet is a compelling tool for research, enabling efficient, cost-effective data collection and facilitating access to large samples and new populations. This book presents a state-of-the-art guide to the internet as a tool for conducting research in the social and behavioural sciences using qualitative, quantitative and mixed methods approaches.

New to this edition:

• Fully re-written to reflect the emergence of Web 2.0 technologies
• Expanded coverage of web surveys for data collection
• Unobtrusive methods to harvest data from online archives and documents
• New practical tools and resources, where to find them, and how to keep up-to-date with new developments as they emerge
• New chapter on research ethics and discussion of ethical practicalities throughout

Guiding the reader through the theoretical, ethical and practical issues of using the internet in research, this is an essential resource for researchers wishing to assess how the latest techniques, tools and methods in internet-mediated research may support and expand research in their own field.

Claire Hewson is Lecturer in Psychology at The Open University. She has a long-standing interest in using the Internet to carry out primary research, and has collected data using a range of IMR methods including surveys, psychometrics and experiments, to investigate issues in: commonsense understanding, particularly folk psychology; online assessment methods in an educational context; the validity of IMR 

methods. She was commissioned to lead a working party to produce the recent British Psychological Society (BPS) guidelines on ethics in Internet-mediated research (2013), has delivered a number of talks and training sessions on this and related topics, and has published more broadly in the area of IMR

Carl Vogel, a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin, is Senior Lecturer in Computational Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Computing and Language Studies at Trinity College Dublin, the University of Dublin.  His work in computational linguistics as a cognitive science frequently draws upon evidence abstracted from Internet accessed data, and accordingly he dwells on the accompanying research methodology issues.  Vogel was on the Management Committee of the successful European COST Action IS1004: Web-based data-collection -- methodological challenges, solutions and implementations (WEBDATANET).

Dianna Laurent teaches a variety of classes for both the English and the Languages and Communication departments at Southeastern Louisiana University and at St. Joseph′s Abbey and Seminary College.  She publishes on a variety of subjects involving the Internet. Dr. Laurent is the associate editor of the yearly ATTW bibliography and the business manager of 19th Century Studies for the Nineteenth Century Studies Association.