Fan Engagement Netnography
Fan engagement netnography adapts ethnography to the online communities where sport fans gather, talk, argue, and create -- forums, fan pages, comment threads, and social-media groups -- in order to understand how fans engage with their teams and with one another. Robert Kozinets coined netnography to bring ethnographic rigor to the study of online communities, treating their archived communication as a naturalistic field site that can be observed and interpreted. Applied to fandom, the method follows fans into their digital habitats and reads the practices that unfold there: the rituals, rivalries, in-jokes, devotion, and co-creation through which engagement is enacted. Rather than asking fans about their behavior in a survey, the netnographer studies what fans actually do and say online, combining naturalistic observation, immersion, and careful interpretation under explicit ethical safeguards.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Kozinets, R. V. (2002). The Field Behind the Screen: Using Netnography for Marketing Research in Online Communities. Journal of Marketing Research, 39(1), 61-72. · DOI 10.1509/jmkr.39.1.61.18935
- Kozinets, R. V. (2015). Netnography: Redefined (2nd ed.). Sage. · ISBN 9781446285756
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Related methods
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