ABSTRACT

This article is a reflexive analysis of two overlapping research methods, social media ethnography and “scroll-back interviews”, that were employed to study how young first- and second-generation African migrants in Australia use social media. This article seeks to contribute to the expanding body of research on digital methods by highlighting the rich data that these methods produced, as well as discussing the limitations and ethical challenges that arose. In particular, we consider participant and researcher privacy online, the opportunities and consequences of digital traces and the unanticipated impacts to the digital researcher who is perpetually immersed “in the field”. These methods revealed a complex, contested and highly mediated set of experiences, and we conclude this paper by suggesting that this type of research requires ongoing ethical reflection due to the ambiguous and often “messy” situations that may arise when undertaking digital ethnographic work. We anticipate that this paper may assist other researchers to test and adapt our approach across a diverse range of topics.

摘要

本文是对两种重叠的研究方法（社交媒体人种志和“回访”）的反思性分析，这些方法被用来研究澳大利亚的第一代和第二代非洲年轻人如何使用社交媒体。本文旨在通过突出这些方法产生的丰富数据，并讨论由此产生的局限性和道德挑战，为数字方法研究的不断发展做出贡献。特别是，我们会考虑参与者和研究人员的在线隐私，数字痕迹的机会和后果以及对永久沉浸在“现场”的数字研究人员的意料之外的影响。这些方法揭示了一套复杂的，有争议的和高度调解的经验，并且我们在本文的结尾指出，由于进行数字人种学工作时可能会出现模棱两可且经常“凌乱”的情况，因此这种类型的研究需要持续的伦理思考。我们希望本文可以帮助其他研究人员在各种主题上测试和调整我们的方法。