Conversations that take place online – from learning management systems to Signal chats to Discord groups to Reddit support groups and Instagram influencing – can be valuable forms of evidence for qualitative researchers. In this workshop, participants will create their own research designs to investigate a phenomenon of interest, as evidenced through social media data, in a systematic and rigorous way. The Paulus and Wise research design decision framework will scaffold learners in how to identify an object of interest; articulate their philosophical and theoretical assumptions about how language functions online; create focused and relevant research questions; ensure methodological alignment across aspects of the study design; resolve ethical dilemmas around treating social media as data; extract and transform social media into a coherent dataset; select appropriate technologies for managing and analyzing data; perform a systematic narrative, discourse and/or thematic analysis; and establish the quality of the findings. Course material will be drawn from Looking for Learning, Insight and Transformation in Online Talk (Paulus & Wise, Routledge, 2019).

This course will count as 6.0 CSS short course hours.