You’ve got mail…! Using email interviews to gather academic narratives

Abstract

The paper explores how computer-mediated communication offers space for academics 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 email can provide a site where the self can be viewed reflexively and re-negotiated through a process of interaction. The paper demonstrates that the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this, by allowing participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge the right of participants 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 recognizing the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online