Применимость критериев оценки качества группового фокусированного интервью к результатам анализа тематического интернет-форума

Social media are interesting to sociologists not only as a specific sphere of reality, but as a new possibility for obtaining digital data for researching different spheres of social life. Digital world could be considered as a model of social reality that gives sociologists an opportunity to use digital data as a substitute for traditional social data. The paper argues that for some research tasks gathering sociological data by traditional field methods could be replaced by collecting data from social media. Such replacement reduces the field phase of research and leaves more time for data analysis. The paper presents results of research aimed to evaluation the compliance of social media data to criteria of the effective focused interview. The web-forum at one of the Russian cinema websites was selected; in this forum the thread devoted to film Leviathan by A. Zvyagintsev, released in Russia in the beginning of 2015 and prompted widespread discussions in media, was picked out. 738 posts from 11.01.2015 to 21.01.2015 were analyzed. Data were categorized into broad codes (themes) and in each theme subthemes were identified, using qualitative data analysis software NVivo10. Research proved the criteria of effective focused interview applicability to the results of web-forum analysis.