Data Collection for this Research

Netnography has been used to collect data in two phases: Phase one was an exploratory online ethnography. The objective of this phase was to choose a community and to generate an overall understanding of its culture. We also wanted to generate the necessary

understanding of our data to narrow down the research question. We aimed at getting a sense of whether the communal discourses brought substantial testimonials of the stigma

experience. We also wanted to see whether there were accounts of consumption withdrawal.

Our third objective was to identify the most relevant role that this community played for the stigmatized. The second phase of data collection focused on digging into the data in a focused manner. The objective was to extensively answer the three elements of the research questions that have been identified in the first phase.

- Phase 1: Exploratory

During this stage the researcher went through the planning and entrée step of the research. This was followed by a first round of data collection. The objective of this phase was to select the community that was most relevant to the research question and to collect a preliminary general body of data that would be analyzed in an inductive manner. We wanted to generate insights on how members experienced the stigma of overweight. We also wanted to identify the stigma relevant function of the community for its members. These elements were used to narrow down the research questions.

First we had to select an online community that has the potential to answer the broad research question identified in the literature review. This process started by running a search using Google search engine to identify the potential communities that are related to the stigma and overweight and that offer high relevance and interaction level. We were looking for French speaking communities as we chose to investigate the issue within the French context.

Our search allowed us to find several forums that discussed the stigma of overweight. We picked the forum of the community “vive les rondes”.

This community stood out as an active forum whose members interacted on a daily basis. It offers a high level of interaction. It is highly relevant of the topic under study since members extensively discuss the stigma they endure. It has around 200 000 members with a substancial number of messages and very rich postings (see table 6 below). This community can be evaluated as a subculture of consumption. Indeed most of the interactions center around Fashion tips, advice, reviews, referrals and secondhand clothes trading between members. Also most of the elements of the newsletter have the objective to help overweight females find stores that meet their fashion needs. It is also countercultural as many

discussions are against the dominant beliefs that fat is bad. It also adheres to the heterogeneity that Kozinets (2009) discussed. Its members come from different French speaking countries mainly in Europe. These include France, Belgium, Switzerland, French speaking Canada and

some African countries. Members also come from different professions. Some of them have been overweight since childhood while others have become overweight after a life event such as pregnancy, death of a loved one, moving out, and job loss… Various topics are tackled in the forum section as highlighted in the table below. These include discussions about fashion, clothes exchange, everyday life concerns, beauty, getting married, pregnancy, health, being overweight/obese, castings, leisure, exercising, meeting other members, practical life matters, and societal, body beauty, marriage of overweight, exercising, self-image, sexuality, Big size clothes exchange, maternity, bricolage, health, culture and arts.

Table 6: Interactions in the “vive les rondes” forum

Topics Number of

Topics 2013 Number of posts Feb

2013 Average response

The opening page of the website includes many sections that are mostly fed by administrators. These include fashion guides and tips, rebates and promo codes, castings announcements for big girls, inspiration documentation to help in the way towards self-acceptance, Exercise, secondhand clothes sales, blogs and FAQs/contact. Although these sections are made of administrator generated content, members are given the possibility to post comments. The blogs section allows members to create their individual page. The Forum section is member generated, and is the most active part of the website. The most active threads are the ones tackling “Everyday life,” with an average of 26 responses per post,

“Marriage” with an average of 20 responses per post, “Practical life” with an average of 19 responses per post, “Big mum” with 18 responses and “Society” with 17 responses. The

“Secondhand sale” is the forum with the most posts. This space is dedicated for members who want to sell or exchange their used clothes. The response rate here is low as many clothes may not attract interest and hence do not generate responses. Also, the postings are very brief since They are mostly practical messages to inquire about price, size, and the shape of clothes or delivery details.

The community’s name means long live the big/fat (referring to females) with a motto of “100% women 0 complex”. In the forum, members do not strive for stigma removal, and do not discuss techniques of losing weight. This has been overruled by administrators as their motto is geared towards fat acceptance. Hence, many discussions involve struggles with self-acceptance and the stereotypes experienced in society. This makes this community relevant for stigma related research. It is a French online community whose members are mainly females. The community is managed by two administrators and not by a company. The forum is mainly built by members with no corporate entities are allowed to contribute to the

discussion. The only evidence of corporate presence is through the banner ads that are

authorized by the administrators and that are used to finance the expenses needed for website maintenance. “Vive les Rondes” started as a blog in 2001 by two people, an overweight female and her male friend. The forum was opened in December 2002. It is a self-acceptance online community as the founders call it. Also, the community is not looking to be activist and operates mainly online although members can meet and physical gatherings are sometimes organized. In this regard, the administrators specify in the FAQ:

“Vivelesrondes, is not the pride of being big or thin! It is the pride of being oneself, to be able to assert oneself to reach self-realization, despite the clichés and the dictates that burden women.” 10/5/12

The administrators clarify that the website is here to gather all females that feel big regardless of their weight as everyone goes through the same process of self-acceptance. They also empathize with the visibly bigger females. They explain that the bigger the body the more one has to face the negative evaluation of others. These will also have more challenges when it comes to finding clothes their size. This group is also unique as it has norms of being judgment free and of acceptance. It accepts all females that self-identify as being overweight regardless of their actual size or weight.

“ We are not here to put people in categories big/not big (referring to females). On the opposite, we wanted to create a space for all those that do not identify themselves with these categories or just do not want to have a framework imposed on them.” 10/05/12

The entrée started in January 2010 where the researcher engaged in non-participant observation of the forum. The objective was to achieve membership status within the

community through a full immersion within its culture. During this step the objective was to get a deep understanding of the community and its members, language, interest and practices (Kozinets, 2009). Formal data collection started in June 2010. The idea was to get a grasp of all the topics discussed and the ones that attracted the most members’ interest. In order, to be able to identify the main issues within this community, we have looked for similarities and differences between the forums. What are the issues that are similar and what are the issues that are different? Which discussions attract more participation? Which topics and discussion are recurring within the forum? We chose to focus on textual data and not analyzing pictures or videos. We have collected about 400 messages that were archived from all sections of the forum within the past four days. The objective was to get a global sense of the data and to try to get a general understanding of the role of the virtual community for its members. We have privileged messages that included a high level of interactivity and a substantial amount of text. We have also included the messages within the discussion threads of interest that went back before our time frame of four days.

During this step, we did not choose to disclose ourselves to the community. We have considered this community as a public space as its access was open to the public and did not require a personal account. Moreover, disclosing ourselves would have most probably led to a rejection of the researcher and could have jeopardized the research. The researcher bio is displayed on the research lab that they belong to which is “the observatory of sales and marketing strategy”. Identifying the researcher with sales and marketing may generate more resistance than collaboration when it comes to getting members input. This potential negative attitude has been double checked and confirmed by two other consumer researchers.

According the Langer and Beckman (2005), researcher intervention may interfere with the authenticity of the data and jeopardize the research results. It has also been checked with a

French colleague that confirmed the potential cultural resistance that the marketing field may generate.

Despite our adoption of the non participatory stance, we have sought to protect the identity of our respondents by providing them with mock names in the research reports. We also were careful not to disclose personal information such as socio-demographic data, contact information that has been encountered. Many of the members provided personal information such as email address, weight, pictures, home/work address, family status, name and numbers of kids, age, and profession…

This Phase allowed us to confirm evidence of stigma management within the VLR community. We also were able to identify some of consumer research relevant the themes relating to stigma blunting. For example, we uncovered that the community offered some fashion related support and knowledge exchange. These encouraged members to get more involved with pursing their self-acceptance projects and improve their well-being (Sayarh, 2012b, 2013). This phase also allowed us to present our work in several conferences and doctoral colloquia to test for relevance and get the necessary feedback on our initial themes to fine tune our the research project (Sayarh, 2012a, 2012b). This has allowed us to fine tune our research question around themes that have been recognized by other scholars as having a high interest and contribution potential within our field. Hence our second phase of data collection was less broad and more focused.

- Phase 2: Focused Data collection

The second and more focused data collection happened in March 2013 where we reviewed all the topics that were discussed in the forum. The objective was to select threads that are relevant to the research questions that have emerged from the exploratory phase. The focus of this second phase of data collection was on messages that offered the necessary richness allowing for the identification of the meanings and emotions associated with

stigmatized consumption. Data was also gathered to reflect the stigma experience, evidence of withdrawal and the practices that community members devised. We were looking for threads that offered a high level of descriptiveness and have a high level of participation by various members (Kozinets, 2002b). Because of the richness of the forum we read the threads on every topic and subtopic backwards in time from March 2013 until reaching data saturation.

Then, we moved to the next topic/subtopic. In total, we have reviewed more than 2200

discussion threads. Appendix 4 provides details of the number of threads reviewed per category.

This review allowed us to identify 28 relevant discussion threads. 16 of these were collected from the “Everyday life” forum, 6 of which from the “Fashion” forum, and 6 from the “Society, Other” forum. This has led to a body of data of around 940 messages that translated into 400 pages in font 10 double space. We have focused on collecting messages with high response rates in order to account for the interactivity of the forum. Hence, the response rate for the data collected averages 32 messages per post. The data analyzed involves the participation of 259 members.

During our data collection, we were looking to retrieve evidence of the meanings and emotions associated with consumption. The collective coping strategies devised to manage the tensions with consumption and society. We also sought to collect data indicating their relationship with the market. We were looking for evidence of communication, implications, interactions, communions, relationships, collaboration and connections (Kozinets, 2009).

During this phase, we kept a journal where we recorded our observations regarding the members’ messages and the emotions related to the community. In this journal, we also kept account of the approach to observing the community. In order to achieve self-reflexivity, we also recorded our former knowledge about the topic at hand. We also inscribed how this knowledge has been acquired, be it from our personal experience, academic and

non-academic readings. The objective was to reflect on the evolution of our understanding of the research object and to clarify any a-priori bias that we may have.