Researching Connected African Youth in Australia through Social Media Ethnography and Scroll-Back Interviews

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.

KEYWORDS:

• social media ethnography
• African youth
• Australia
• privacy
• ethics

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous peer reviewers for their generous feedback on an earlier version of this article. We would also like to thank the 15 African youth participants who took part in this research. Thank you for volunteering your time and energy for this research. Thank you for trusting us and allowing us to share your intimate social media moments with the readers of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 A Bitmoji is a personal emoji that users create and then use on their various social media accounts (particularly Snapchat). The Bitmoji is an expressive cartoon-like figure which can have different hairstyles, face shapes and outfits.