Online Ethnography for People With Chronic Conditions: Scoping Review

Online ethnography has been making a unique contribution to people with chronic conditions as a complement to offline ethnography. It can also be used to study the complexities and contingencies of people with chronic conditions in the context of the internet. Therefore, there is a need to synthesize existing knowledge on research activities concerning online ethnography for people with chronic conditions.

This scoping review aimed to profile the existing evidence on the application of online ethnography for people with chronic conditions, focusing on the characteristics, contributions, and implementation process. This will provide recommendations for the future use of online ethnography.

We followed the scoping review methodologies developed by Arksey and O' Malley and the Joanna Briggs Institute. A comprehensive search was conducted on the PubMed, CINAHL, Embase, Scopus, and PsycInfo databases using preselected keywords. The search was limited to documents written in English and published between January 1, 2000, and February 1, 2022. After removal of duplicates, articles were screened by 2 independent reviewers reading the title, abstract, and full text. One reviewer extracted data, which were descriptively analyzed to map the existing knowledge.

After 2836 titles and abstracts and 51 full texts were screened, 27 publications were included in the analysis, published between 2009 and 2022. Most studies were from the United States (11/27, 40.7%), and most articles collected data from online forums (10/27, 37.0%). Moreover, the most commonly used type of researcher involvement was passive analysis (24/27, 88.9%), and 18.5% (5/27) of the topics concerned people with mental illness. Notably, the majority of articles did not report the immersion process in detail (17/25, 63.0%). Ethical issues were mentioned in 88.9% (24/27) of the included articles.

We analyzed the current literature across fields and found that online ethnography can be exploited to explore the deeper experience of people with chronic conditions that are difficult to investigate using traditional ethnography. We found that there was diversity in researcher involvement, immersion process, data collection, and data analysis. However, most studies reported the insufficient immersion into the online environment. Researchers should determine the research approaches and data resources in order to complete culture immersion before researching. We also found that there was no uniform standard for ethical issues. Therefore, we recommend that researchers collect public and private data, obtain informed consent, and preserve the privacy and confidentiality of online users with chronic conditions. The findings can provide a practical reference for the use of online health care in studying chronic conditions.