Pixelated Participation: A Ph.D. Student's Notes of Online Data Generation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted many aspects of life globally. Similarly, the imposed travel restrictions and border closures in Australia have prevented me from travelling to Indonesia for my Ph.D. fieldwork. Due to this issue, I had to move my interviews, focus groups, and narrative writing online. I conducted my interviews and focus group discussions with English teachers in Indonesia through synchronous platforms such as WhatsApp and Zoom. In addition, I utilised a private Facebook group to facilitate narrative writing activities which were pivotal in my data generation process. Many research studies (see, for example, Archibald et al., 2019;Deakin and Wakefield, 2014;Tuttas, 2015) have documented how online research has afforded both the researcher and participants with flexibility, cost effectiveness, and convenience in a research project with time restraints, geographical distance, and other logistical issues. However, a story about online data generation in the COVID-19 context from a Ph.D. student's perspective remains underexplored. In this autoethnographic account, I will reflect on the process of online data generation in the context of my Ph.D. study. I argue that the online data generation in my research has yielded a "guarded optimism” (Madge and O'Connor, 2004, p. 9) for synchronous online data generation as an equal, rather than secondary option for qualitative research data generation which often uses face-to-face interviews and focus groups as the "gold standard of interviewing” (Hine, 2005, p. 4). Through this story I hope to enrich conversations about the possibilities and challenges of doing online data generation for a Ph.D. study during a global pandemic. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022.