Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to explore the possibilities and challenges in conducting virtual ethnography to gather qualitative evidence of youth’s dietary habit formation and how that is affected by the social environment in rural Malaysia.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to explore the possibilities and challenges of using social media as a virtual ethnography tool in forging empirical investigation with rural-to-urban Chinese Malaysian migrant youth. Ethnography, consisting of close observation and key informant interviewing, is the most widely accepted methodology to obtain cultural knowledge of the natives. Its significance to the discipline of anthropology and social sciences in general is of no doubt. However, as that social media are increasingly central to contemporary everyday life, its intervention has dramatically changed the way of information being circulated. Dwelling on the traditional face-to-face ethnography can no longer fully address our scholarship inquiry in understanding the complexity of human interaction, behaviour formation and cultural transformation.

Based on my nine-month fieldwork on youth's food habits in rural Malaysia, this paper aims to further this discussion by exploring the possibilities and the challenges of using social media as an experimental virtual ethnography method to understand the complexity of dietary environment around adolescents. It will justify, in what situations is social media a particularly good method to use? What are the ethical issues we need to be concerned? How to conduct data collection and analysis in reality? What are the advantages and disadvantages of this method and how it can be improved in future research? I engaged myself in several popular virtual spaces such as Facebook and online forums to observe how informative materials about food is circulated and perceived among the young and how their discussion is formed and developed.