Immersion in Social Media Research: The Netnographic Path

Presenter: Robert Kozinets
This webinar is part of the webinar series on Insights in Qualitative Research Methods, a partnership between ATLAS.ti, the International Qualitative Research Toolkit at the University of British Columbia Okanagan, and Inquiry Methodology at the Indiana University School of Education.
Ethnography has been used to study and understand social media for over three decades, fostering a blooming of different approaches with a variety of different names, such as webnography, appnography, virtual ethnography, and digital ethnography. In this presentation, the creator of netnography, one of the first and most well-developed qualitative research methods for studying social media, will overview the challenges of immersive digital participation and explain the importance of the notion of netnographic immersion. Participants will leave the webinar with practical guidance for engaging in netnographic research and an understanding of how immersive methods distinguish rigor in this pursuit and lead to new methodological developments.
Bio:
Robert V. Kozinets is an academic innovator who has developed important new methods and theories that are widely used around the world. His work seeks a deep understanding of the rapidly moving worlds of social media and popular culture, and the technological forces and actors that influence it. His research methods changed the practices of market research, and his works-which have been published in 7 books, numerous articles and books chapters, videographies, artistic works, and poetic formats-have been cited almost 35,000 times (Google Scholar). Kozinets is the Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism and Marshall School of Business in Los Angeles, California.