The State of the Field in Blogging Research

Milwaukee.
Relief: my stomach seems to be the right way up again, and the horrible headache from yesterday is gone, too. Just in time for the second day at AoIR 2009, which begins with the blogs session that has both my paper (with Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai) and Tim's paper in it. More on those soon, but we begin the morning with Anders Larsson, who provides a review of current research on blogs and blogging. Technorati has now indexed some 133 million blogs since 2002, and there has been wide research interest in blogs as well - from a focus on politics in blogs to communication processes among individuals and more recently an interest in the organisational and professional uses of blogs.

The field of blogging research seems to be 'pre-paradigmatic', Anders suggests, meaning that research reviews are important for solidifying the research foundations and strengthening the scientific field by providing the bigger picture. This needs to be interdisciplinary in scope, especially across the social sciences and humanities. Anders's study proceeded by searching the relevant article databases to find scholarly work on blogs, and ended up including some 248 articles in the study. These articles were classified according to various variables (theme, phase, empirical or not - most were empirical, method, level of analysis - mainly meso or organisational, and direct or indirect study - mostly direct, in isolation from other technological artefacts).

Key themes here were sociology/psychology (21%), business/organisation (15%), and politics (14%); research divided into various phases (issues for blogs and blogging appeared early on, uses and users of blogs grew strongly a little later, and remains growing, effects of blogs and blogging also growing,but less strongly, and improvements for blogging practices is only now becoming a focus of research). Most empirical articles (62%) used quantitative methodology, 28% were qualitative, and 10% took a mixed approach. So, typical blog research articles are sociological or psychological, empirical studies that use and carefull describe quantitative studies.

On this basis, it might be useful to pursue more non-empirical work that helps theory-building and integrates previous findings. Also, over half the articles deal with uses and users of blogs; perhaps theories could be more strongly stated. Of the qualitative papers, there was very limited description of methodology; this should also be addressed. And it would be worth exploring less frequently used methods to provide new and different kinds of data. Additionally, perhaps it is now necessary to study blogs more indirectly by also including other, similar technologies; this would recognise the increasing embedding of blogs in a wider media ecology. And finally, it may be necessary to look more closely at smaller, sub-themes - most obviously, technology; Anders also suggests the theme 'social medicine' as providing a useful insight into how the blogging medium may be used in health care situations.

Technorati : AoIR 2009, blogging, blogs, methodology, research
Del.icio.us : AoIR 2009, blogging, blogs, methodology, research