Hi there

Anyone had an expeirnce with using a discussion board for data collection?

If yes, do you recommend a spsific site which can design and host the discussion board?

hey sue000,
i am using existing online discussion boards for part of my data collection. things you need to consider include anonymity (or not), the ease of exporting the data to your analysis programme, or, to print it out, without it just looking like text salad, and the ease of saving/logging the inputs.
since you are starting a new discussion board, are you intending to use it as a sort of online focus group interview? if yes, perhaps you should consider a chat tool instead, where dialogue comes more naturally. if not, you might want to consider using an existing discussion with an established community of contributers, instead of building your own which can be very hard.

I have used these for material for my MA and they were very useful. The thing is though that the group was a closed website, I was a member too, and the material could not be seen by those outside the group, plus most of the material I used from this source was for data (20% of the respondents said xyz type of thing). If the material you intend to collect could be in any way damaging (even in ways that you might not even consider)to the idividual then you would probably need to make sure that there was some site security from that point of view, so that it could not be viewed say by another member of the family/partner looking at the website history on the computer for example. You would also need to make sure they knew what they were paticipating in and were told how they could get the material withdrawn if they wanted to.

Having said that I intend to get some people to participate in my research in this way but will make sure it follows the ethical guidelines set out by the university. It sure beats trekking up and down the country half a dozen times to get the info.

wow thanks for the inofs

Sahni i am thinking about doing a focus group but not in the form of interview because the issues are many and i need to observe the interacitons of the group, but i am also thinking to do an online interview with another group (sample)

could you please tell me which websites or software you are using and for which type of communcaiton (real time chat ? or discussion?

thanks

i don't know the technical specs, but i am less interested in interactions, so i am using an existing discussion board within an online community. it is very topic specific, a bit like this one here (postgradforum), but on a different topic obviously (no, i am NOT doing participant observation here . it is technologically a bit more advanced, gives more options.
sorry, can't help more.

Thanks for the replay