The paper explores how the Internet and email offers space for participants to
think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It
draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online
narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters
in virtual space. The paper discusses how the asynchronous nature of email helps
to facilitate this by allowing research participants to contribute to research in their
space and according to their own preference in time, and engage in a process of
reflection and interaction. However, it also argues for the construction of more
collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge their right to use the
temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon and
learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the
researcher’s agenda. It concludes by recognising the importance of email as a
research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online