Qualitative Research in Digital Environments: A Research Toolkit

The overarching scope of Qualitative Research in Digital Environments: A Research Toolkit is to provide researchers who want to study digital environments across a variety of disciplines, from marketing to the social sciences and digital media, with some basic concepts and techniques that can be used to detect, collect, organise, analyse and interpret digital data. Specifically, the book is a theoretical and practical toolkit for doing qualitative research on social media environments, such as blogs and online forums, as well as social networking sites such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. With this work, we aim to offer a pivotal resource for the study of cultural practices and meanings across online social networks and platforms. Building on the grounds of ‘digital methods’ and especially the principle of follow the medium , our approach aims to represent a valuable methodological guideline that supports the understanding of complex socio-cultural contexts that are populated by dispersed, fluid and dynamic social formations – and to also be useful for multidisciplinary purposes.