New Technologies for Social Research Series

Qualitative Research and Hypermedia

by Dr Bella Dicks, Bruce Mason, Professor Amanda Jane Coffey, and Professor Paul Anthony Atkinson

Published 1 January 2005

Digital culture and digital technologies have rapidly become unavoidable and essential forms of social experience and communication in our emerging globalised society. If we want to attempt to analyse and understand our technology-saturated society, and all its new media, then we must also develop research methods and forms of analysis that can accommodate and exploit digital culture and digital technologies.

This important new methods text sets out to equip qualitative researchers with the tools necessary to conduct ethnography in the age of email and the internet. It will investigate how digital technologies potentially transform the ways in which we do research. This text also introduces the reader to new emerging methods that utilise new technologies and explains how to conduct data collection, analysis and representation using new technologies and `hypermedia'.

Essential reading for any student or researcher interested in qualitative research in an age of hypermedia, this text:

- explains how digital technology impacts on social research;

- investigates how digital technology has reshaped the field of social research;

- consider the implications of bringing multimedia into the forefront of qualitative research;

- suggests new ways of observing and documenting a `technologised' and design-rich society;

- enables the reader to use new technologies to handle and represent qualitative data;

- unpacks the theoretical implications of writing and researching for the electronic screen