Interesting question Missing data in qualitative research? I think of saturation as an important principle, if saturation is accomplished, then we would not have missing data. In quantitative research, missing data is usually similarly treated as its opposite, the outliers, as noise. Date: Fri, 6 Aug 2010 16:17:44 +0100 From: William Dutton <william.dutton@oii.ox.ac.uk> To: "air-l@listserv.aoir.org" <air-l@listserv.aoir.org> Subject: [Air-L] Missing Data in Qualitative and Online Research Message-ID: <8B138436-DD99-4B3E-BF52-3A89D026938E@oii.ox.ac.uk> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="Windows-1252" Dear List Members, My colleagues and I would greatly appreciate your input to an exploratory project on missing data in qualitative and online research.* We would appreciate anything from your immediate reactions while reading this e-mail to detailed references to literature that has addressed our questions. There are two very general but heuristically useful questions. Your views on either would be welcomed. Feel free to reply privately or to the list, as you wish. 1. What is ?missing data? in the context of qualitative research and how is it dealt with? 2. Likewise, in computer-mediated research, are researchers missing particular kinds of data, or believe that they are missing particular kinds of observations, and how are they compensating or otherwise addressing this gap? Thoughts? Thank you, Bill *This is a collaborative project between the ESRC?s National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) ?hub? (Graham Crow, Rose Wiles), WISERD (Amanda Coffey), Oxford eSocial Science ?node? of NCeSS (Bill Dutton, Alison Powell), and Qualidata/Timescapes (Libby Bishop), based on our recognition of a shared but not well developed problem. William Dutton, Director Professor of Internet Studies Oxford Internet Institute 1 St Giles', Oxford OX1 3JS UK e-mail: william.dutton at oii.ox.ac.uk Web: http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/people/?id=1 Phone: +44 (0)1865 287 212 Cell: +44 (0)7768 823906