Development of methodologies for researching online: the case of food blogs

The expanding reach of the Internet has opened new sites for conducting social science research. The prominence of blogs in combination with their varied areas of focus makes them a rich source of qualitative ‘user-generated data’. However, there are significant practical challenges in empirical research on digital material online. Central among these are ethical, archival and methodological issues. We highlight these in the development of our cross-disciplinary approach. We combine multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to examine blogs, in our case here, food blogs, created on Wordpress platforms. ‘Food blogs’ are a prospective source of information about parenting, feeding and caring for children, given blogs’ wide use among parents, particularly mothers, in the UK. This relatively new digital environment of the blog, in which often quite intimate portraits of family life are materialized through public ‘multimodal narratives’ of mothers, provides the context for our online research.

In this paper, we explicate on our combined multimodal social semiotic, ethnographic and narrative methods to provide a more encompassing approach: one that is able to attend to the unique, online material, which might not be wholly illuminated by any one of the three methodologies used independently. This involves coming to terms with the different epistemological perspectives that guide and shape the cross-disciplinary collaboration. We explain the framework we developed and the research processes, including data sampling, collection, archival and analysis; provide an overview of key findings from the substantive focus of this project; discuss the overall possibilities and constraints of working with combined perspectives; as well as offer suggestions for future online research in blogging platforms.