Session 24

The emergence of digital methods has presented various ways of studying and understanding digital phenomena in general as well as online and internet-related research in particular. This includes studies of online archived objects, online spatial analysis, social media and social networking, online network mapping, and various online social, political, economic and cultural references. Internet and online environment researchers have lately focused on addressing the following issues: How digital methods provide tools to respond to the challenge of Big Data on the one hand and how digital methods provide a base for what scholars call “online groundedness” in order to examine various socio-political change and cultural conditions shaped by online dynamics and constellations on the other? These digital methods widen the scope of researchers and change research practices and subjects fundamentally. However, this also raises “classical” questions of empirical social research: How are sampling strategies, data collection and methodological procedures changing? Do conventional quality criteria need to be adapted or supplemented? This session provides a unique platform to reflect on practical use of digital methods in various research fields and map out frameworks for exploring new possibilities for online social science research as well as encourage critical discussions on recent trends in the field of digital methods.

We invite papers that address ways of doing and using digital methods, including but not limited to: Internet research and methodological innovation: Digital methods of social media research. Digital methods in studies of online political discourses and participation. Ethics and questions of digital research. Practical use and challenges of doing digital research and methods. Mixing methods in researching digital landscape. Insights from dealing with Big Data. Techniques and challenges of online data collection. Interdisciplinary cooperation between technical and social sciences on digital methods. Enhancement of “established” research designs by digital methods. Online participatory action research.

ABSTRACTS

1.Digital Methods in Action: Use, Challenges and Prospects

Gabriel Faimau  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Jannis Hergesell  (Germany)

The emergence of digital methods has presented various ways of studying and understanding digital phenomena in general as well as online and internet-related research in particular. This includes studies of online archived objects, online spatial analysis, social media and social networking, online network mapping, and various online social, political, economic and cultural references. Internet and online environment researchers have lately focused on addressing the following issues: How digital methods provide tools to respond to the challenge of Big Data on the one hand and how digital methods provide a base for what scholar’s call “online groundedness” in order to examine various socio-political change and cultural conditions shaped by online dynamics and constellations on the other? These digital methods widen the scope of researchers and change research practices and subjects fundamentally. However, this also raises “classical” questions of empirical social research: How are sampling strategies, data collection and methodological procedures changing? Do conventional quality criteria need to be adapted or supplemented? This session provides a unique platform to reflect on practical use of digital methods in various research fields and map out frameworks for exploring new possibilities for online social science research as well as encourage critical discussions on recent trends in the field of digital methods. We invite papers that address ways of doing and using digital methods, including but not limited to: Internet research and methodological innovation: Digital methods of social media research. Digital methods in studies of online political discourses and participation. Ethics and questions of digital research. Practical use and challenges of doing digital research and methods. Mixing methods in researching digital landscape. Insights from dealing with Big Data. Techniques and challenges of online data collection. Interdisciplinary cooperation between technical and social sciences on digital methods. Enhancement of “established” research designs by digital methods. Online participatory action research.

2.Measuring travel behaviour via smartphones

Vera Toepoel  (Utrecht university, Nederland)

Smartphone apps are starting to be commonly used to measure travel behaviour. The advantage of smartphone apps is that they can use location sensors in mobile phones to keep track of where people go at what time at relatively high precision. In this presentation, we report on a large fieldwork test conducted by Statistics Netherlands and Utrecht University in November 2018. A random sample of about 1900 individuals was drawn from the Dutch population register and invited to install an app and keep that for a week. Based on an algorithm the app divided each day into “stops” and “tracks” (trips), which were fed back to respondents in a diary-style list separately for every day. Respondents were then asked to provide further details on for example the mode of travel and purpose of trips. Having both sensor data and survey data allows us to investigate measurement error in stops, trips and details about these in some detail. This presentation focuses in identifying. 1) False positives: a stop was presented to a respondent that wasn’t a stop (and by definition also a track connecting this stop to another one). How can we identify such occasions, how did respondents react to false positives, and how can we correct for this in estimates of travel behaviour? 2) False negatives: stops were missing from the diary (often because a Respondent forgot the phone, or GPS tracking was not working properly). How often did this happen, how did respondents react (they could add a stop, but often didn’t) and can we say anything about their possible impact on estimates? We conclude with a discussion of how to generally move forward in combining sensor and survey data for tracking studies.

3.The digital and digitalised self: The use of selfie as a methodological and discursive strategy in the relational experiences among young people in Botswana

Wame Maryjoy Kesebonye  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Gabriel Faimau  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Tshoganetso Dolly Ramooki  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Digitalisation has brought the question of self-identity, particularly the construction of digital self-identity among young people, to a critical point: existential negotiation of the self in a digital space. As young people continue to spend much of their lives in the online and digital space, the digital self has become more ingrained in the day-to-day individual lives and performances. The emergence of self-portrait, popularly known as the selfie, adds a new dimension to the self-performativity in the digital space as it brings along a new culture that shapes self-presentation, social relationships, and socio-digital consumption. While operating within the context of media logic, selfie-taking and selfie-posting also offer a glimpse into young people’s mental dispositions in our contemporary digital and mediatized world. Drawing on data collected through self-administered questionnaire completed by 411 participants and 20 qualitative interviews, this paper will focus on examining the following: first, how selfie culture offers a new digital space for interactional experiment and identity formation among young people; second, how young people adopt selfie-taking and selfie-posting as methodological and discursive strategies as they navigate their relational experiences in the contemporary digital world and culture; third, how participation and performance in online and digital environments contribute to the sense of self and socio-digital interaction among young people.

4.Fieldwork reflective views on web-based surveys among young people in Botswana

Tumisang Tsholetso  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

The Covid 19 pandemic has been a wakeup call for a lot of developing countries including Botswana. Developing nations find themselves playing catch up with the developed world when it comes to the digital space. Researchers in the south are grappling with the unprecedented push towards the much-dreaded methodological technologies as a way of conducting social science research. The use of online surveys has become an inescapable choice. The exponential increase of smartphone use places the topic of web-based surveys at the center of survey methodology discussions. However, there is limited literature on the benefits and drawbacks of conducting these digital web-based surveys via smartphones in the global south specifically, Botswana. This article reflects issues pertinent to the doctoral researcher’ practical fieldwork experiences on the urban youth context in Gaborone on the Social Capital and the Contested Networking Space: Smartphone Use among Young People in Botswana study. This paper addresses key methodological and ethical issues emanating from the quantitative web-based surveys from a sample of youth in four purposively sampled institutions in Botswana; the complexities surrounding gaining access, the identification process, the navigating exercise, the quality of data and different degrees of ethical concern regarding privacy, transparency, confidentiality, and security. The existing methodology literature tends to simplify these processes. Fieldwork experience arguable suggests that the literature is partially applicable; nonetheless, there are further critical issues that need to be considered by researchers. The increasingly technological mediated nature shows how timely and important this article is right now in response to COVID-19.

5.Using a Facebook group for data collection as an alternative to conventional ethnographic methods during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic – challenges and opportunities

Cornelia Thierbach  (Technische Universität Berlin, Germany)

Due to the pandemic and the accompanying preventative healthcare measures, collecting empirical data in face-to-face situations were limited in Germany. Therefore, we decided to explore an alternative form of data collection using social media, namely a Facebook group. In this talk, I want to reflect on our experience with this approach and what challenges and opportunities we faced. Background of this study is the interdisciplinary research project “UbiAct” which deals with smart kitchens. We are asking how such technologies influence everyday life in general as well as practices and routines in the kitchen in particular. For this purpose, it is necessary to clarify how people currently experience their kitchen to obtain a basis for comparison and to see how widespread such technologies already are in everyday life. This research question is at the center of our inquiry using the Facebook group but was originally designed as ethnographic phase within our research project. Considering that food and cooking are widely discussed topics on social media, this approach seemed quiet promising as well as appropriate during the pandemic. We decided for a Facebook group for several reasons: (a) provided features (e.g., possibility to upload videos, pictures, and comments), (b) locating contributions at one place (and not spread out on participants’ profile pages), (c) hosting the group as private, and (d) the demographic structure of Facebook users is more diverse compared to other social media platforms in Germany. Reflecting on this research study in general, we can state that this form of data collection works. However, we need to take a closer look at several methodological topics that affect generalization of results as well as data quality, in particular: sampling strategies, data collection and their provision by participants, dealing with different kinds of data, asynchronous of communication, and group dynamics.

6.Prophetic Ministries and Religious Flyers in Botswana: of Urban and Digital Spaces?

Tshoganetso Dolly Ramooki  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Gabriel Faimau  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

Wame Maryjoy Kesebonye  (University of Botswana, Botswana)

The secularisation thesis of Peter Berger affirms that a pluralistic condition offers a market situation. Consequently, as stated by Berger, “religious institutions become market agencies and the religious traditions become consumer commodities.” This paper examines Berger’s thesis by focusing on the adoption of secular advertising among prophetic ministries and how this contributes to the religious practices in Botswana. Over the past few years, the public presence of prophetic ministries in Botswana has been supported massively by creative advertisement of religious events and religious figures through the use of flyers. Applying the discursive approach and techniques of marketing, flyers of prophetic ministries emphasize the pull factors that bring economic and spiritual benefits. Urban and digital spaces are two common spaces that are popularly used to circulate religious flyers. In Botswana, religious flyers can be easily found in offices, schools, urban roads, bus stations and shopping malls. The same flyers are also posted online on various social media platforms or circulated through WhatsApp messengers. This paper explores the trends of religious marketing, the characteristics of religious flyers and how the circulation of religious flyers desecularises urban and digital spaces as they turn the common secular adverts into religious texts in public places. In particular, the paper examines how religious flyers reconstruct religious practices of prophetic ministries and the extent to which their circulation in the urban and digital spaces reinforces public religious imagination. We suggest that religious flyers do not only facilitate the socio-religious acceleration of communicative messages or increase the social visibility of prophetic ministries in public spaces. The use and circulation of religious flyers in urban and digital spaces also function as symbolic resources and reference points for urban and digital aesthetics and the need for public and religious reflexivity.