Archives of Everyday Life

This chapter focuses on blogs - now the ‘elder statesman’ of Web 2.0 - and the opportunities and challenges they offer the qualitative researcher. Drawing on a research project that used blogs to examine everyday understandings and experiences of morality (see Box 8.1), the chapter introduces blogs as contemporary multimedia ‘documents of life’. I argue that blogs provide qualitative researchers with unique access to first-person textual accounts of everyday life. In addition, they provide large amounts of instantaneous data that are global, archived, searchable and relatively resource-lite. Suitable research questions and steps for conducting blog research are discussed, along with ethical issues involved with handling blog data. I then go on to consider problems and solutions involved with blog methodologies and suitable methods for analysis, before finishing with some personal reflections on my use of blog data in the everyday morality study (see Box 8.2).