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Student Affairs
Daniel Salter Penn State University Editor Stuart
Brown |
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Fall 2000 • Vol. 1, No. 3 |
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Kevin Kinser |
Jayne E. Brownell |
This article describes an attempt to use the Internet to study a particular student culture. The findings of the study itself (Mueller, Brownell, & Kinser, 2000), reported at an earlier conference and in a separate paper in preparation, will here be of secondary importance to a description of and rationale for the methodology used. We have three goals:
Students at most colleges and universities now have relatively convenient access to fast network connections, and they use the Internet for regular communication with peers both on campus and off (Gatz & Hirt, 2000). Since computers have always been a part of the lives of today's college students (a traditional first-year student would have been born in 1981, the year IBM released its first PC), they are generally familiar and comfortable with the technology involved. Likewise, the World Wide Web has an intimate place in their history - current undergraduates were in grade school when the first graphical browsers were developed, and by the time they got to high school, web browsing was the most popular Internet activity.
As the Internet increasingly pervades undergraduate student life, it becomes important to consider the role that on-line communities play in the development of a student culture. These communities, developing as often around common interests that cross campus lines as they might around more proximate issues, have been recognized as playing a significant role in the lives of the general Internet-using public (Kendall, 1999). For faculty, email and listservs have transformed scholarly communication (Bennett, 1997). And on-line discussions (e.g., the Chronicle of Higher Education's "Colloquy") have become a common means of academic debate and discussion. Students have certainly not been immune to similar influences: web pages, listservs, chat rooms, and instant messaging can be seen as simply an updated version of the late night dorm room bull session. The students involved may or may not be on the same campus. Nevertheless, a group can potentially form which enjoys shared values, behavior patterns, ideals, artifacts, language, and ways of viewing the world - arguably meeting the definition of a student culture (Kuh & Whitt, 1988).
This can perhaps be seen most clearly when looking at a culture that forms on-line without a corresponding campus-based organization. In our study, closeted gay and lesbian students represent such a population. Certainly they would be present on almost any college campus, but by definition, could not form an obvious student group. Research on a population like this would be difficult through traditional means. But, because closeted students have an easily accessible Internet presence (through chat rooms and gay-oriented web sites), a study could be conducted using that technology.
None of us had experience in Internet-based research, but we could readily see the potential problems such an approach would entail. Therefore, our study was designed with two purposes in mind. The primary purpose was to examine how closeted gay students experience their identity on campus and in the on-line environment. The secondary purpose was to explore the use of the Internet for conducting research on student populations in higher education. As stated earlier, the findings related to the primary purpose have been reported elsewhere. This paper will focus on our findings related to Internet-based research.
Subjects were recruited through a brief message posted in a chat room devoted to gay issues. The message directed interested individuals to a web site for more information. This posting yielded 38 inquiries, of which 13 individuals completed a basic demographic survey which was administered on-line. Seven students also agreed to be "interviewed" for the study. These interviews took place on-line in a private chat space. Data were collected over the course of eight weeks.
While the study was largely successful and helped us gain some interesting insight into the experiences of closeted students, several issues, as expected, did affect the research process. A brief description of each follows.
Institutional review. Approval from a research institutional review board (IRB) involved not only the typical methodological descriptions, but also an explanation of the technology to be used and, given the anonymous nature of the medium, how the study could be completed in an ethical manner. The researchers paid very close attention to these issues in preparing the review protocol which was approved expeditiously.Technical considerations. Several technical considerations were evident. On the negative side, our familiarity with chat rooms was limited. Internet service providers could be unreliable. Typed messages lost the nuances of face-to-face interviews. Asynchronous conversations could be time consuming. On the positive side, interview transcription was automatic. Costs for data collection were minimal. Geographic barriers were eliminated. And respondents' anonymity was virtually assured.
Confidentiality and trust. These two issues went hand-in-hand. As students whose gay identities were not known to others, we had a particular responsibility to ensure confidentiality. And, even though we used an on-line consent form with contact information for our Institutional Review Board, students not familiar with procedures for university research would have to place an inordinate amount of trust in us based primarily on typed assurances. Several students did, in fact, drop out of the study because of these risks, particularly those whose only email address was in the .edu domain. Even though identity is masked as a matter of course in a chat room environment, students still perceived that, by volunteering information, an unscrupulous person (one of us, presumably) would link them to their home campus and place their straight identity in danger. For these students IRB approval apparently held little stock.
Internet culture considerations. Much as the culture of a particular campus influences the development of student culture, the overall culture of the Internet has an impact on the expectations and mores of on-line communities (Porter, 1997). As outsiders, we were perceived by some to be violating the unstated norms of the on-line communities we entered. In several ways, this perception was correct. We presented ourselves as researchers and faculty members and not gay students. We were offering not the typical chat room conversation, but a focused dialogue on the participants' experiences as a closeted gay or lesbian on a college campus. And we stated openly that we intended to publicize our findings rather than maintaining the world-apart nature of many Internet-based communities (Fernbach, 1999). Frankly, we were not altogether successful in negotiating this issue. We experienced occasional flames and group rejections to the extent that, simply because of our request for subjects, a chat room was pressured to ban researchers entirely from its virtual space. We humbly admit our errors and ignorance in this respect and hope that others will avoid our mistakes.
Reliability and validity. Reliability and validity are concerns with any research, all the more so on the Internet where identity is so indeterminate. Were the students we interviewed and surveyed actually gay? Were they truly closeted? Were they even students? To these and similar questions we remain agnostic. It was simply impossible to ensure accurate identity and none of the responses we received seemed particularly inconsistent. We were left, therefore, to accept all at face value. Parenthetically, it can be argued that these same concerns can exist in survey research that is not conducted on-line. The concerns regarding selection bias and unknown response rates, however, were of much more serious concern. The generalizability of our results was most certainly affected, and we struggled with how to represent the findings we did have.
With the increased use of telecommunications technology in higher education, opportunities to use the Internet as a research tool have become more obvious and practical. Techniques such as email surveys, real-time or asynchronous interviews, and web-based simulations have the potential to be an important part of the data collection repertoire for researchers of the college student experience. And, for populations (like closeted gay students) which would be difficult, if not impossible, to study via traditional means, the Internet will prove to be an invaluable tool.
Our initial foray into this realm generated findings that we believe add to the student culture literature. It was not without stumbles, as noted above. From our experience, we make several recommendations to other researchers considering similar projects
It is worth noting that although our study was planned before the release of an American Association for the Advancement of Science report on ethical considerations for conducting Internet-based human subjects research (Frankel & Siang, 1999), our recommendations are largely consistent with and echo those recommendations made by this organization.
We do not pretend to be experts on Internet-based research. However, we do feel that the literature on this topic is limited, and that our contribution here can prove useful to other researchers. From distance learning to scholarly collaborations, the Internet and associated technologies are making a significant impact on the academy. Researchers of the student experience should be prepared to develop and use new methods, as well as to recognize and explore the role of the Internet in campus life.
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D. C. (1997). New connections for scholars: The changing
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J. (1999). There is a there there: Notes toward a definition
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M. S., & Siang, S. (1999, November). Ethical and
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& Hirt, J. B. (2000). Academic and social integration in
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& Whitt, E. J. (1988). The invisible tapestry:
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J. A., Brownell, J. E., & Kinser, K. (2000, April).
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(Ed.). (1997). Internet culture. New York: Routledge.
