Engaging with Research Participants Online

[From Introduction] In the last ten years there has been a global spread of the Internet. In 2007, there were 1.24 billion Internet users (Burkeman, 2008). This has had a significant impact on the conditions of social interaction, providing opportunities for individuals to construct the reality of their everyday lives online and offline and for these two to interact. It is no longer a special place that people visit occasionally. It has reconfigured the way in which individuals communicate and connect with each other. The ‘trajectory of acquaintanceship development’ (Zhao, 2006, p. 471) has become such that individuals can now get to know each other first online through chat rooms, before using other medium such as email, telephone and face-to-face contact. There has been a rapid increase in websites such as Youtube, MySpace, Facebook and blogs (online diaries or journals) of many descriptions. Websites such as these not only offer opportunities for ‘social networking’ but they are reshaping the way in which news and views are gathered and disseminated (Goodfellow, 2007). They allow people to present themselves, create presentations of themselves, present their views and invite the views of others.