Virtual Ethnography in Practice

Virtual ethnography will begin at the end of the interview stage. I will randomly choose five Facebook users from each campus from those who participated in the interview process. I will send those selected an email explaining virtual ethnography and how I’m interested in the Facebook presence. I would further explain that no personal information would be revealed. Their identity would be masked be a pseudonym and the artifacts that I would use would be disguised in such a way that it would not reveal the individual’s identity, but yet expose the relevant thematic information. After receiving the permission from 15 Facebook users to perform a virtual ethnography. I would begin to “catalog” the artifacts present on Facebook and log those artifacts that show some level of coping as defined by the previous research done on coping. After finding thematically appropriate artifacts. I will go back to the individual users about one or two artifacts that she or he presented online and ask them to clarify the context of the artifact. The clarification will be included in the analysis.