This paper explores the methodological issues encountered when using email as a web-based interview in on-line qualitative research. By drawing on two separate research studies that used this method to explore participants' understandings of their professional experiences and developing professional identities, the researchers consider the methodological implications in using this approach. These include issues affecting the credibility and trustworthiness of the research design of the studies and issues around the authenticity of participants' voices and how that was affected by power and control in the interview process. Despite these dilemmas, the paper recognises the contribution that web-based approaches can make to research by allowing researchers to hold asynchronous conversations with participants, especially when they are distant from the researcher, and to generating reflective, descriptive data. It leads us to conclude that it is worth refining our methodological framework to strengthen the trustworthiness and credibility of future research studies that use email.

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This article argues for the potential that email interviewing has as a qualitative method in educational research. The article draws on research that uses email as a way of generating online narratives in order to understand how academics construct their identities. In doing so, the article considers the challenges that email interviewing poses for researchers who might wish to use the method as a way of studying and understanding academics' lives, particularly the nature of ‘presentation’ and ‘performance’ that takes place with/in email narratives. Nonetheless, despite these challenges, the article concludes by recognising the possibilities the method has for increasing reflexivity by providing both the time and space for academics to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience.

The paper explores how the Internet and email offers space for participants to think and make sense of their experiences in the qualitative research encounter. It draws on a research study that used email interviewing to generate online narratives to understand academic lives and identities through research encounters in virtual space. The paper discusses how the asynchronous nature of email helps to facilitate this by allowing research participants to contribute to research in their space and according to their own preference in time, and engage in a process of reflection and interaction. However, it also argues for the construction of more collaborative approaches to research that acknowledge their right to use the temporal nature of space and time that email offers to construct, reflect upon and learn from their stories of experience in their own manner, and not merely to the researcher's agenda. It concludes by recognising the importance of email as a research tool for capturing the complexity of social interaction online. Wider social research has explored the use of digital/Internet methods for conducting research on particular topics or groups online as well as discussions on how the Internet has created sites of social interactions for individuals and communities where practices, meanings and identities are constructed (see for example Madge and O'Connor, 2005; Hine, 2005; Murthy, 2008; Ison, 2009;Beneito-Montagut, 2011).At the same time, such studies have highlighted the interrelations between online space and offline contexts (Orgad, 2006) and the ways in which people's spaces increasingly use face-to-face and online communications as part of their daily lives, the 'here and now' of everyday life in a particular space and time interacts ever more easily with the 'there and now' of the other in time and space (Zhao, 2006, James and Busher, 2013)..Compared with wider social research, qualitative educational research has been relatively slow in its use of online research methods, achieving significantly less applicability in educational contexts as a tool for collecting participant-generated Comment [nrj71]:The introduction has been rewritten to clarify and situate the article. The paper is contributing to the body of literature in qualitative educational research where online research has had limited applicability in educational contexts. I have made reference to the wider literature in the social sciences where online qualitative research has become widely used, but then linked this to the lack of take up of online research in qualitative educational research 3 reflective qualitative data (Hasim, De Luca, and Bell, 2011 (Harricharan and Bhopal, 2014). This paper contributes to this body of literature by exploring how on-going, reflective, qualitative data was collected using email interviews to better understand academics' lives and identities (James 2003(James , 2007. Using this study, the paper will discuss how the temporal dimensions of email allows individuals to construct, share and un...