engleski

Features Are Not Enough: Mixed Methods in Web Site Analysis

This paper discusses the usefulness and evolution of feature analysis in the context of Web studies. A version of what can be seen as an updated form of content analysis has been used extensively in studies of Web sites with political content. There have already crystalized two generations of this kind of research. The first is still predominant in the United States (and used by e.g. Schneider and Foot). The second one, containing the elements of semiotic theory of interpretation, has more recently been developed in Italy (by Miani). Based on their experience of empirical research of Web sites, the authors of this paper propose what they see as a third generation of feature analysis. Their approach combines the quantitative nature of feature analysis with qualitative methods such as discourse analysis and visual semiotic analysis. The applications of this approach have so far shown that qualitative methods are a useful supplement to feature analysis, enabling further distinctions in cases where its application in isolation from other methods would tend to level them out. The proposed approach is consistent with recent prominence of mixed methods in sociological empirical analysis, and contributes to the triangulation of the studied material.

Web studies; feature analysis; discourse analysis; semiotic analysis; mixed methods; triangulation

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