Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk

Looking for Insight, Transformation, and Learning in Online Talk is a comprehensive guide to analyzing digital interaction in formal and informal online spaces. The book establishes a new research framework for addressing major challenges that have arisen as social exchanges, meaning-making, and knowledge-building increasingly take place in social media, discussion forums, and online communities.
With a focus on methodological alignment to support valid and trustworthy knowledge claims, the authors present a series of design decisions to help researchers:
frame their object of interest and unpack underlying assumptions
understand key differences between researcher-influenced and pre-existing online talk
ethically extract and organize data for analysis
apply rigorous qualitative, quantitative, and computational methods to answer their research questions
Written for scholars in education, business, communication, media studies, health sciences, political sciences, and beyond, this is a thorough approach to the research methods and concerns essential to the study of talk in online contexts.

Trena M. Paulus is Professor of Qualitative Research Methods in the Department of Lifelong Education, Administration and Policy at the University of Georgia, USA. Alyssa Friend Wise is Associate Professor of Learning Sciences and Educational Technology in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Director of the Learning Analytics Research Network at New York University, USA.

List of Figures. List of Tables. Preface. Acknowledgements 1. Why Investigate Online Talk? Introducing the Research Design Framework 2. What Are We Looking For? Identifying the Object of Interest 3. What Does Online Talk Represent? Philosophical Assumptions and Methodological Alignment 4. What is the Research Question and Approach? Informing the Study Design from Prior Work 5. When Can Online Talk Be Treated as Data? Ethical Practices 6. How Will the Data Be Acquired? Characterizing, Bounding, and Extracting Online Talk as a Data Source 7. (with Robyn Singleton) How Will the Data be Analyzed? Part One: Quantitative Approaches Including Content Analysis, Statistical Modeling, and Computational Methods 8. How Will the Data Be Analyzed? Part Two: Qualitative Approaches including Thematic, Narrative, Conversation, and Discourse Analysis 9. Have We Found What We Were Looking For? Revisiting the Research Design Framework