‘Are you ready for a little chat?’ ¹ : Creating and developing WhatsApp group chats as a digital research method

Abstract This paper explores how social media ‘group chats’ were developed and applied as a digital research method. Group chats were created using the social media platform WhatsApp to investigate issues regarding Eurovision Song Contest fan practices and their intersection with the expression of sexual identity. I argue that group chats advance our understandings of traditional focus group and remote research methods in geography. Group chats do this by providing opportunities to conduct remote research with multiple groups of people. They are also mobile, temporal, provide additional digital tools for users to express their identity, and help to improve data capture and understanding of social processes. This research highlights the benefits and disadvantages of using group chats as a digital method in terms of their organisation, delivery, data collection and analysis. Benefits include that they are mobile and instantly accessible, they can co‐ordinate groups of people who are geographically disparate, they can take place over a period of time rather than being a ‘one‐off’ event, they remove the barriers of face‐to‐face communication that produce social anxiety, and they enable the capture of multidimensional forms of data, including images, text and GIFs. Disadvantages include missing out on and recontextualising data when absent from a group chat temporarily, and limited data output from and dynamism between participants who were unavailable for long periods. I explore how applying group chats as a digital research method challenges and blurs the distinctions between the personal, the researcher and the researched, and how they can also be reaffirmed in direct messaging spaces where participants flirt with the researcher. Lastly, this paper considers the future potentials of using group chats and social media platforms, like WhatsApp, to understand the socio‐digital practices around live music events.