Blog analysis

Blogs are the quintessential early 21st century text blurring the boundary between private and public. This entry reflects on the use of “weblogs” or “blogs” as a social research tool and the opportunities and challenges they offer the qualitative researcher. The defining features of blogs are “frequency, brevity and personality” (Turnbull, 2002, p. 82). More formally, a “blog” refers to a website that contains a series of frequently updated, reverse chronologically ordered posts on a common web page, usually written by a single author (Hookway, 2008). Blogs are treated as multimedia “documents of life” that offer unique personal accounts of everyday life and provide large amounts of instantaneous data that are global, archived, searchable, and relatively resource-lite. This entry provides guidance on blog data collection and analysis and outlines practical, methodological, and ethical issues that social researchers need to consider.