Online, Data and Method

I preferred to write reflection about this article since I had some difficulties about using conversation analysis method on an email data. For my own reasoning and justification, I need to read more about the online-oriented data and conversation analysis. As we all know that internet is relatively new phenomenon and the discussions around it are still blurred and flowing. There are many challenges and debates around online-based relations and their corpus. With the emerging online courses, the instructors and students start to have relatively new environments and different ground to communicate. At this post, I tried to follow the data, field and idea in this particular articles to generate more broad questions enabling me to inquiry about the online communications.

Article is about 20 email interactions in online counseling and its relations with counseling dropouts. How clients and counselors build and maintain the online counseling relationships is, therefore, an important area of study and is presumably related to treatment outcomes? This is the general research question of article. For this post, I am specifically interested in how the nature of data is presented and how the method is defined and utilized.

Descriptive numbers, ethical concerns and time span are the main frame for the nature of data. These are the implicit producers of our general assumptions. I certainly agree up providing those information to readers and reviewers. My critique is based on the larger context. I do not think that we have the same perception of time as well as subjects. Let explain you that our existence in online space seems different than the actual existence. Furthermore, we have to redefine the time, subject and ethical concerns for the online interactions which are different than actual ones. For example, there are many software enabling us to use language in a better way. Written text is mostly automatically corrected by computer. In this sense, the variety of research question with conversation analysis is going to be changed and redefined.

The two main conversation analysis concepts were used in the article. These are the action of request and the design of request. While reading the article, I remained in between the yes and no position. This means that I could not agree upon their whole constructions. I have some problem with my data. With the help of some software, you can easily define the lexical interconnection throughout the entire textual data. There are still space to focus on both micro-micro structures in online interactions. On the other hand, what if all of them are become artificial, like automatic email responder? I am interested in simulations, manicans and communications. This is my big question to understand my data and methods.

Comments are about the article, titled Complaining and Management of Face in Online Counseling by Wkyke Stommel and Fleur var der Houwen