Qualitative methods are ideally suited to zoom in on the lived experience of individuals, to follow the knitty-gritty of everyday processes, to draw close to subjects and situations, and thus to penetrate people’s local worlds. At the same time, the use of such methods also requires zooming out again to understand what happens within ‘small’ worlds within larger and long-term contexts and thus to grasp the bigger picture. Qualitative researchers need to learn ‘to see the world in a grain of sand’.
In the digital age, the methodological toolboxes are renewed to reflect the complexities and dynamic character of online content. For instance, nowadays life stories are not only recorded through face-to-face interviews but also through life stories in the digital domain (e.g. Facebook, Instagram). Content analysis provides a powerful tool to capture the building blocks of interactions in the digital space and is useful for combining with quantitative methods. Digital ethnographies, or netnographies, show ways to capture social media’s complexity in the lives of people.