Online Naturalistic Inquiry in Project Management Research: Directions for Research

The current qualitative research methodologies employed to study projects are heavily dependent on interviews, despite data being created across different media in this digital age. Social media, news articles, LinkedIn profiles, WhatsApp groups, etc. can have influence on project stakeholders, both internal and external. This article calls for the use of online naturalistic inquiry to enhance our understanding of project management in this digital era and discusses the advantages and potential avenues for future research. Naturally occurring online data ensures that the data collected is devoid of any influence from the participant and researcher, and are unobstructive, more in-depth, and digitally indexed, making it a good source of retrospective or longitudinal study. Potential pitfalls of employing online naturalistic data such as the poor representativeness of data, the lack of guidelines, and traceability of data are also discussed. Online naturalistic inquiry can complement existing project management research methods by providing an avenue for studying coordination and innovation internally or stakeholder engagement and project image externally. Thus, project studies can gain by expanding its terrain towards an analysis of the everyday resources generated when projects interact online.