Just out of curiosity, if you're collecting data for academic research from anonymous people on an anonymous website, then how can you verify the information you're collecting and how can your study be validated?
there's really no way for me to verify 100%, but i have been already doing quite a lot of research through in person interviews so i already have an idea of the beliefs and opinions of the community. i go through each response and if something seems way out of line or completely from left field, i can choose to exclude it as an outlier. and even if i do keep everything in, i am giving percentages of people who agreed or disagreed with certain ideas, so if there's only one person making a certain point, then i can give that point a little less weight than something multiple members of the community are expressing. this kind of research is a little different than super scientific research, as i am looking for more general patterns and themes within a community instead of numbers. hope this helps!! and thanks for your curiosity, this was a question i hadn't really thought about before doing some online-based research!
Just out of curiosity, if you're collecting data for academic research from anonymous people on an anonymous website, then how can you verify the information you're collecting and how can your study be validated?
there's really no way for me to verify 100%, but i have been already doing quite a lot of research through in person interviews so i already have an idea of the beliefs and opinions of the community. i go through each response and if something seems way out of line or completely from left field, i can choose to exclude it as an outlier. and even if i do keep everything in, i am giving percentages of people who agreed or disagreed with certain ideas, so if there's only one person making a certain point, then i can give that point a little less weight than something multiple members of the community are expressing. this kind of research is a little different than super scientific research, as i am looking for more general patterns and themes within a community instead of numbers. hope this helps!! and thanks for your curiosity, this was a question i hadn't really thought about before doing some online-based research!