Ulrike, The topic you are interested in would be very suited to a Communities of Practice approach. This definition is from the website of Etienne Wenger (http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm). He and Jean Lave came up with the term. As you can see from the definition, CoP is about how groups form and develop, which seems to be what you are interested in. As for specific research methodologies, I'd also recommend looking at sources like Murielle Saville-Troike's "Ethnography of Communication." While this does not specifically deal with on-line activity, the methodologies are still quite relevant/adaptable. Three characteristics are crucial: 1. */ The domain: /* A community of practice is not merely a club of friends or a network of connections between people. It has an identity defined by a shared domain of interest. Membership therefore implies a commitment to the domain, and therefore a shared competence that distinguishes members from other people. (You could belong to the same network as someone and never know it.) The domain is not necessarily something recognized as "expertise" outside the community. A youth gang may have developed all sorts of ways of dealing with their domain: surviving on the street and maintaining some kind of identity they can live with. They value their collective competence and learn from each other, even though few people outside the group may value or even recognize their expertise. 2. */ The community: /* In pursuing their interest in their domain, members engage in joint activities and discussions, help each other, and share information. They build relationships that enable them to learn from each other. A website in itself is not a community of practice. Having the same job or the same title does not make for a community of practice unless members interact and learn together. The claims processors in a large insurance company or students in American high schools may have much in common, yet unless they interact and learn together, they do not form a community of practice. But members of a community of practice do not necessarily work together on a daily basis. The Impressionists, for instance, used to meet in cafes and studios to discuss the style of painting they were inventing together. These interactions were essential to making them a community of practice even though they often painted alone. 3. */ The practice: /* A community of practice is not merely a community of interest--people who like certain kinds of movies, for instance. Members of a community of practice are practitioners. They develop a shared repertoire of resources: experiences, stories, tools, ways of addressing recurring problems—in short a shared practice. This takes time and sustained interaction. A good conversation with a stranger on an airplane may give you all sorts of interesting insights, but it does not in itself make for a community of practice. The development of a shared practice may be more or less self-conscious. The "windshield wipers" engineers at an auto manufacturer make a concerted effort to collect and document the tricks and lessons they have learned into a knowledge base. By contrast, nurses who meet regularly for lunch in a hospital cafeteria may not realize that their lunch discussions are one of their main sources of knowledge about how to care for patients. Still, in the course of all these conversations, they have developed a set of stories and cases that have become a shared repertoire for their practice. Randall Sadler Ulrike Pfeil wrote:
Hello everybody, I am interested in doing longitudinal qualitative analysis of asynchronous online communities in order to analyse the development of the online community over time (e.g. looking at how people develop a sense of community, how communication and interaction patterns change over time, how people take on or abandon certain roles within the community etc.).
However, I am having a hard time finding methodological guidance on how to go about it (the longitudinal part). Does anybody have experience with longitudinal qualitative analysis of CMC or can recommend literature that might help me? Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Kind regards,
Uli
-- Randall Sadler Assistant Professor University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Division of English as an International Language 3080 Foreign Languages Building, MC-172 707 S. Mathews Urbana, IL 61801 USA