Data Analysis
Meta-ethnography for LIS: A Practical Guide
Published: Nov 15, 2025
Meta-ethnography is a qualitative synthesis method that goes beyond summarizing studies to interpret them together. Developed by George W. Noblit and R. Dwight Hare in 1988, it’s built around “translating” key concepts across studies to generate new, third-order insights, often theoretical models you couldn’t see from any single paper.
Noblit & Hare outlined seven iterative phases. Below is a LIS-friendly rendering:
- Getting started – Define the phenomenon (e.g., “information avoidance in teens”)
Exploring Social Media Ethnography: A Window into Digital Lives
Published: May 16, 2025
In a world where much of our social interaction, identity formation, and information exchange happens online, social media ethnography has emerged as a powerful method for exploring how people live, relate, and make sense of the world in virtual spaces. At its core, social media ethnography is the adaptation of traditional ethnographic practices—long-term observation, immersion in communities, and rich, qualitative description—to online platforms like TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). Rather than entering a physical village or institution, the researcher steps into a hashtag community, a fandom group, or a forum thread, observing how