“I found it on the Internet”
The promises and perils of
opportunistic data in qualitative
research
CHRISTINE HINE
DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF SURREY
“I found it on the Internet”

A research journey – from exotic Internet to mundane online spaces

The tradition of “found data” in social research

Mumsnet – using found data to illuminate parenting practices

Mumsnet as a research object: influences, constraints, biases

Opportunism as a promising yet risky research strategy
A research journey from exotic
Internet to mundane online spaces
1990s

The Internet as an exotic environment, detached from everyday
experience… cyberspace

A clear separation between online and offline

A case to be made for social research to take the Internet seriously
2015

The Internet as an increasingly mundane conduit for everyday life

A “data deluge” – online manifestations of all aspects of life there
for the taking

A tendency to take data from online space as reflective of “the
public”
Found data and social research

A tradition of utilising data that is generated without our intervention

Lee (2000), Webb et al (1981), Kellehear (1993)

Avoids concerns about the artificiality of data generated by the
researcher’s intervention, especially where

Topic is sensitive/answers may be socially undesirable

Topic may be too trivial to recall

Concern is to avoid leading questioning

Gets closer to the messy reality of lived experience

Reduces burden on research participants
Found data and social research

Found data can involve creative reinterpretations of the traces that
everyday activities leave behind

E.g.


Nose prints on museum exhibit glass (Webb et al ,1981)

Graffiti and urban culture (Rodriguez, 2003)

Political talk in the hair salon (Press and Johnson-Yale 2008)
But… this approach comes with some issues concerning robustness
of interpretations
Online forums as sources of found
data

Seale et al (2010) Online forums compare favourably with interviews
as a way of exploring health issues

Harvey et al (2007) Online forums for exploring teenage perceptions
of sexual health: frank discussions making more use of everyday
terminology than interviews

Now… online forums have become a credible source especially in
health research

But… how can we interpret the significance of what happens online
when we rely on found data?
Mumsnet headlice dataset

Threads with headlice/nits in the message subject in 2010

62 threads, 1127 messages

Subject to coding in Nvivo

According to proposed treatment

According to emergent themes
 risks,
treatment failure, emotions, parenting expectations,
sources of expertise, school policy, family, friendship

Children’s health – 32 threads, average 10.7 messages

General health 8 threads, average 10.5 messages

Am I being unreasonable? 6 threads, average 54.8 messages
Mumsnet headlice themes

Emotional registers and the risks of infestation



Mechanisms of removal

Emphasis on anecdotal evidence

Reference to life cycle facts – but little verification
Risks of treatments


Disgust rather than shame, or direct health risk
“putting chemicals on a child’s head”
Sources of expertise

Parents as experts, rather than healthcare professionals
Mumsnet headlice themes

Representations of responsible parenthood

Exploring the boundaries of parental autonomy, with respect to
kinship groups, friends, schools, blended families and the state

Emergent disjunctures between parenting advice aimed at nuclear
families, and the lived experience of diverse family structures

A site for portrayal of contemporary parenting, as a morally
charged and socially situated practice
Mumsnet as a portrayal of
everyday life

Not a form of discussion that happens at the school gates

Not likely to emerge in interviews

A unique, situated data set, neither artificial nor generalizable

The Internet demographic

The Mumsnet demographic

Those who post vs those who simply read

Site conventions and the cultural expectations on style

Conventions of AIBU vs other types of thread
Mumsnet headlice data set

Not an insight into public perceptions of science, per se

Not possible to define with any certainty who these people are

A source of discourse, generated in context as any discourse would
be

An insight into what some people do with science, and how they
contextualise it against other forms of knowledge

Authentic as one portrayal of contemporary parenting in circulation

A form of data that escapes the artificiality of social research data
collection methods, but brings its own limitations
Conclusions : opportunism as a risky
strategy

This is a small data example, not big data

However, the issues raised by analysis of this small data don’t go
away if we scale up

Looking at found data on a massive scale brings benefits, but it
doesn’t eradicate the underlying contextual nature of the data

Contextualising factors:

Internet demographics, platform characteristics, platform
demographics, socially patterned usage styles, local and micro-local
cultures, algorithmic factors…

The Internet is, and is not, society as we know it

Big data, and data found on the Internet do not offer a perfect
solution for a problem of data scarcity in social research
Conclusions: opportunism as a risky
strategy

The contemporary celebration of big data, and other approaches
to found data on the Internet, is promisingly risky

Promising: an unprecedented scale of data availability for
exploration of patterns of social activity

Promising: insights into aspects of everyday life hitherto inaccessible

Risky: still only a limited window on the messy reality of the everyday

Risky: constrained in key ways by the specificities of the online
situation

Risky: marginalises key sectors of the population who are not online,
or whose online activities do not leave a public trace
Harvey KJ, Brown B, Crawford P, Macfarlane A, McPherson A. 2007. 'Am I normal?' Teenagers, sexual
health and the internet. Social Science & Medicine 65(4): 771-81
Hine, C. (2014) Headlice eradication as everyday engagement with science. An analysis of online
parenting discussions. Public Understanding of Science 23(5) 574–591
Kellehear, A. (1993) The Unobtrusive Researcher: A Guide to Methods St Leonards, NSW: Allen &
Unwin. Lee, R. M. (2000) Unobtrusive methods in social research. Buckingham: Open University Press.
Press, A. and C. Johnson-Yale (2008) Political talk and the flow of ambient television. Women
watching Oprah in an African American hair salon. In New Directions in American Reception Study.
Ed. P. Goldstein and J. L. Machor. New York: Oxford University Press pp. 307-325.
Rodriguez, A. (2003) Sense-making artifacts on the margins of cultural spaces. In Expressions of
Ethnography: Novel Approaches to Qualitative Methods. Ed. R. P. Clair. Albany: State University of
New York Press pp. 231-140.
Seale, C., J. Charteris-Black, et al. (2010). Interviews and Internet Forums: A Comparison of Two
Sources of Qualitative Data. Qualitative Health Research 20(5): 595-606.
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the Social Sciences. Dallas, TX: Houghton Mifflin. 2nd edn.