Observing real-world groups in the virtual field: The analysis of online discussion

This article sets out to establish the naturalistic study of online social communication as a substantive topic in social psychology and to discuss the challenges of developing methods for a formal analysis of the structural and interactional features of message threads on discussion forums. I begin by outlining the essential features of online communication and specifically discussion forum data, and the important ways in which they depart from spoken conversation. I describe the handful of attempts to devise systematic analytic techniques for adapting methods such as conversation and discourse analysis to the study of online discussion. I then present a case study of a thread from the popular UK parenting forum Mumsnet which presents a number of challenges for existing methods, and examine some of the interactive phenomena typical of forums. Finally, I consider ways in which membership categorization analysis and social identity theory can complement one another in the exploration of both group processes and the rhetorical deployment of identities as dynamic phenomena in online discussion.