My colleagues and I would greatly appreciate your input to an exploratory project on missing data in qualitative and online research.* We would appreciate anything from your immediate reactions while reading this post to detailed references to literature that has addressed our questions. (I’ve also posted these questions on the AoIR Listserv.)

There are two very general but heuristically useful questions. Your views on either would be welcomed. Feel free to reply privately or to the list, as you wish.

1. What is ‘missing data’ in the context of qualitative research and how is it dealt with?

2. Likewise, in computer-mediated research, are researchers missing particular kinds of data, or believe that they are missing particular kinds of observations, and how are they compensating or otherwise addressing this gap?

Thoughts? Thank you,

Bill

*This is a collaborative project between the ESRC’s National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) ‘hub’ (Graham Crow, Rose Wiles), WISERD (Amanda Coffey), Oxford eSocial Science ‘node’ of NCeSS (Bill Dutton, Alison Powell), and Qualidata/Timescapes (Libby Bishop), based on our recognition of a shared but not well developed problem.