A Case for Using Online Discussion Forums in Critical Psychological Research

Abstract

Online forums provide a wealth of publicly accessible data and have proven particularly useful for critical psychologists wishing to examine naturalistic data on a wide range of social phenomena. This article begins by considering the use of online discussion forums for critical discursive psychological research and outlines ethical debates regarding their use (particularly in light of past and current British Psychological Society guidelines). To demonstrate how such data can be used in critical psychology I provide an illustrative example of a discursive analysis of a single online discussion thread taken from a diabetes newsgroup that examines anti-social online behaviours in the form of “trolling,” “flaming,” and heterosexism.

Keywords:

• discourse analysis
• flaming
• heterosexism
• Internet ethics
• Internet research
• online discussion forums
• trolling

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Elizabeth Peel who supervised the PhD research from which these data are taken, the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper, and to the editors of this special issue for their help and encouragement.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Adam Jowett

Adam Jowett, PhD, is a Lecturer in Psychology at Coventry University, United Kingdom, Secretary of the British Psychological Society’s Qualitative Methods in Psychology Section, and Editor of the Psychology of Sexualities Review. He is a critical psychologist with research interests in the intersections of gender, sexuality, and health.