The analysis of resident forums as an innovative tool of housing research?

Background
In the course of the Web 2.0 chat rooms and internet forums have been popular long before the advent of facebook & co. and have been able to attract a variety of users, who could use these platforms to discuss and exchange all kinds of information.
An interesting special form of such communication platforms are internet forums that are spatially and thematically oriented towards specific user groups, namely the residents of certain housing estates. Such ‘virtual staircases’ often enjoy great popularity as the number of registered users and posted contributions show. In this ‘safe space’ residents speak relatively freely and directly about issues that matter for them especially in terms of their individual daily living and their coping with it. In addition, the themes are generated by themselves and are not imposed by outsiders. Due to this thematic independence and variety, the analysis of such forums differs from conventional housing research: Basically any type of statement is of interest for the investigating of the life-world perspective of the residents. To what extent this alternative data represents a viable source shall be clarified in this study.

Research questions
To our knowledge a similar study on resident forums has not been conducted before in the German speaking world. Therefore this study follows an explorative approach in order to answer basic questions in how far the analysis of such forums and their contents can contribute to housing research. However, there are some leading questions that will be answered in the course of this project:

• Who are the users of these forums and in which stage of their residential biographies are they?
• Which topics dominate the forums and to what extent do they correlate to the everyday life in the housing estate?
• What durability, frequency and intensity do these topics have?
• To what extent can the analysis inform about the identification with the housing estate, the specific building or the place in general?
• Does a forum help to create a ‘virtual community’, which is either complementary to or a replacement of the real community?
• To what extent can the results from the analysis of such forums, as a specific form of communication and self-expression, be implemented into housing research?

Resident forums are a special type of ‘virtual community’, whose members are also part of a real group of people that share a physical social space. The overlapping of the virtual and the real community is sometimes more, sometimes less pronounced – the virtual community is not necessarily congruent with the real community.
Overall, the analysis of resident forums provides great added value: For a researcher in the field of housing these forums offer much more unfiltered opinions and statements than other survey methods, where people tend to be more concerned about political correctness and politeness. Moreover, most other empirical approaches are restricted to certain themes; in the forums the users themselves determine the topics. For this reason, the analysis of the resident forums makes an important contribution to research on residential satisfaction and offers responsible institutions an unbiased view of the problems of the residents and the required action.