Analysis

Analysis of the community forums, webpages and interview data was an iterative process of interpreting, deriving new questions, searching for and collecting new data, rejecting, confirming and refining our emerging interpretations until they stood the weight of the data. Throughout the observation and data collection process, both researchers made extensive use of reflexive fieldnotes. These are notes in which the researchers noted what they were seeing and what might be going on. Emerging ideas, interpretations, avenues to explore, and ideas on additional literature to incorporate were detailed. The codes we eventually applied to the data in a more systematic fashion were derived from these fieldnotes and our review of the literature on rumor. After reading the interviews and messages, we identified several themes that we believed characterized some of the processes operating in this community. From this we developed a coding scheme that we applied in a more systematic analysis of the interviews and messages.

After applying these themes, we looked at all the instances of particular themes to look for patterns within them. As our thinking progressed, we developed new themes and additional follow-up questions for our informants. We also downloaded additional threads from the two forums where we looked for counterexamples to challenge our emerging interpretations, and evaluated our themes in light of this data. 

We are now conducting what are called “member checks.” We are placing our interpretations on our research page and inviting members to read our findings and comment on them.

last modified on April 27, 2004