Structuring the Haystack

Large-scale online communities, such as Reddit or Quora, have emerged as promising research contexts, offering insight into an unprecedented range of real-time user discourses. However, researchers striving to access, collect, and meaningfully process such conversation data face a trade-off between capturing breadth (structures, relationships) and depth (content, meaning) of community interactions. Building on a mixed-methodology design, our contribution offers an avenue to harness and combine advantages of both approaches, first by clustering the data based on a theoretically derived dictionary (discovering structure) and second by qualitatively coding and interpreting the resulting clusters (discovering meaning). We illustrate this methodological approach with data collected from a community of online workers on Reddit where we focused on how human resource management (HRM) practices transform in the gig economy and how digital platforms use a hybrid HRM system that combines elements of high-performance and control-oriented HRM philosophies.