A Case for Using Online Discussion Forums in Critical Psychological Research

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

Critical discourse analysis · Discourse analysis · Discursive psychology · Epistemology · Heterosexism · Internet privacy · Naturalism · Naturalistic observation · Online discussion · Online forum · Psychoanalysis · Psychological research · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods · Impact of Technology on Adolescents · Psychology · Social Media and Politics · Social Psychology

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