The Impact of the Internet on Research Methods:

Does It Create a New Methodology or Just a Novel Use of Existing Methods?

Niv Ahituv[1]

Yael Steimberg[2]

The Internet is rapidly developing into the largest depository of data ever created by human kind. It contains a huge and variegated selection of content sites, commercial sites, chat forums, blogs, governmental services and more. It has also become a “switchboard” for over a billion of people all over the world. Being so, the Internet is rapidly becoming the “New World” of research targets. Basically, there are two types of Internet related studies:

1. Research about the internet: Research that deals with phenomena related to or derived by the Internet itself. For instance: addiction to the Internet; quality of service in B2C services.
2. Research through the internet: Research that employs the Internet as a platform to study issues that traditionally were used to be studied through other channels. For example: political polls; customer satisfactory surveys.

The major purpose of the research described here is to probe whether the introduction of the Internet has changed the research methods used in the above two types of studies or nothing has been drastically changed and only the technical channels are now enhanced by a new tool. Specifically, we pose two research questions:

1. Do the two types of Internet research entail the development of new research methods and tools or do they just make novel use of existing tools?
2. What are the unique characteristics of Internet related research of the two types?

This research is a “meta-study”. It is based on a comprehensive review of pertinent literature in various academic disciplines in order to identify the traits of Internet related studies. The salient disciplines are all tangent to Social Sciences: Sociology, Education, Management, Psychology, and the like.

The first phase of the study covers two research methods: surveys and structured observation (a survey of Internet sites performed by one person). The initial findings indicate that most of the studies employ existing research methods but try to exploit some of the unique features of the Internet. The Internet generates, however, some very non-trivial methodological questions related to sample selection, coverage of populations, response rate, non-bias responses, unit of analysis, and more. The use of the structured observation approach is growing fast but also involves various methodological questions that should be adhered to.