Analysis chaining: conceptual and empirical framing of digital traces

Qualitative researchers have traditionally used interviews as their main source of data. Recently, however, digital trace data have become a common source of data for qualitative research of various kinds. Digital traces may consist of action markers, short conversational text, long-form text, as well as other formats. Such forms of digital traces differ in their degree of “richness.” Therefore, some digital traces may require more conceptual framing than others to become useful in theory development efforts. In this chapter I provide several ways of thinking about how digital trace data can be framed using both concepts and empirics to raise the “conceptual height” of theorization. Conceptual height helps developed theories to connect to cumulative knowledge traditions and therefore make them more useful to the information systems (IS) research community. Crucially, I will also describe how different analyses can be chained together within a single research study to successively provide framing, by empirical means, of subsequent analyses. The ideas put forth in this chapter have implications for how qualitative research can adjust to using digital traces, both in terms of adapting manual techniques as well as adopting computational methods.