Dissertation on customised bicycles and the motivations for buying one

Hi all,

My name is Stanimir Bolyarov and I am currently a final year marketing student at RGU in Aberdeen. I am doing my dissertation on the customised bicycle market in the UK and the motivations and perceptions of people about it. One of my methods for collecting data is via netnography (internet etnography) which in simple words is browsing through forums and social media websites and looking for posts, comments and opinions of current and potential customised bicycle buyers. There are a few ethical guidelines I need to follow and they include me actually posting this on here so I can get your approval of using your posts as data. On top of that, I am hiding all information about people's names and post dates so everything stays anonymous. If someone is not ok with me doing this, please leave a comment and I will make sure not to include your comments in my paper.

Thank you all,
Stan

Fetch the pitchforks!

There are a few ethical guidelines I need to follow and they include me actually posting this on here so I can get your approval of using your posts as data. On top of that, I am hiding all information about people's names and post dates so everything stays anonymous.

Good of you to tell us. If we've posted on here it's pretty much public domain / published, right? Tagging @Velocio who should probably see your post, he is the gatekeeper of here.

Internet Etnography sounds dead intellectual, a 21st century social science. Is it just fancy trawling through searches?

If we've posted on here it's pretty much public domain

It can used in court, so use in an academic study seems reasonable

Literature on the issue is still arguing whether it is a public domain or not, so to be on the safe side, I decided to let you know. And yes, if I can get @Velocio 's approval for doing this, this will tick one more ethical concern as dealt with.

@Skülly It's basically spending hours reading posts and comments about bikes and trying to connect them to current theories and other academic research on the topic. It's actually good fun, I'm glad I chose to do it.

Cool^. Best of luck.

I am fine with you doing this on the proviso that:

1. Any bot/scraper that you use to do this only crawls public information (no using cookies to try and fake being a user) - similarly any information you publish comes from the public information (available when you're signed out)
   
2. You respect a reasonable crawl rate of no more than 0.5rps (30 requests per minute... a deep crawl is going to hit a lot of uncached content and result in a lot of computation on my end).
   
   

Note: If you're configuring a crawler, stick to /conversations and exclude /comments as the latter provides a permalink location for information already render in the former.

If you're not using a crawler... and if you're doing this as a manual ethnographical study, you'll want to spend most of your time in the Current Projects forum (which is all public and you wouldn't have to worry about permissions).

Finally... I've got to ask, I always thought modern ethnography involved face-to-face discourse with those who are the subject of the study... but in this case you want to divine understanding from reading alone? Are you later looking to conduct interviews once you have a theory to support?

This is great, thank you!

I am doing it manually so not using bots or scrapers. And yes, Current Projects is definitely a gem. Actually, I firstly did interviews with people who I can get hold of and I am using netnography to either support or contradict what they said. Since most of my sample were people who have already purchased one, I am looking on forums and social media to find out what people who are willing to purchase think too.

And got the love of God ignore everything Amey has ever posted.