More than a solo method: Netnography's capacity to enhance offline research methods.

As the use of the Internet has become ubiquitous and pervasive in people's work and day‐to‐day life, netnography has been increasingly adopted to study online communities and activities in a range of social science disciplines, including Geography. The literature has identified that netnography is an effective research method in its own right. This paper aims to contribute to the literature on netnography by revealing novel possibilities that emerge when netnography is combined with offline research methods. It finds that a more active and participatory approach to netnography can significantly facilitate and smooth offline research methods such as interviews and observations in two major ways. First, it increases social and cognitive proximity between researchers and their participants. Second, it enables the spatial and temporal extension of researchers' fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]