APPLIED THEORY SUMMARY  Describes a social networking Web site designed to gather first-hand reports from technical communicators about single sourcing and/or content management systems  Argues that Web 2.0 paves the way for online qualitative research that can help achieve participatory research ideals rarely realized using traditional methods Using Web 2.0 to Conduct Qualitative Research: A Conceptual Model CHRISTOPHER THACKER AND DAVID DAYTON INTRODUCTION W eb 2.0 refers to innovations that have enabled entrepreneurs to reinvent the Web by making it more interactive and participatory. Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and MySpace have experienced phenomenal growth, en- ergized by the desire of people with shared interests to socialize and regularly exchange information, opinions, and other content. By combining instant Web publishing, social networking tools, user-generated content, and com- munal tagging, rating, and commenting—all within an easy-to-use content management system—Web 2.0 has the potential to increase the richness, dynamism, and ultimate impact of interview-based qualitative research. To explore this potential, we have developed a con- ceptual model for a research Web site designed to collect structured accounts of technical communicators writing about their experiences and opinions related to single sourcing and/or content management methods and tools. This novel data collection method is part of a research project supported by a grant from the Society for Technical Communication; to date, the project has gathered data through an online survey and through interviews and site visits. The firsthand reports (FHR) Web site, as we call it, will complement traditional data collection methods by combining Web 2.0 technologies such as those in use at the well-known social networking sites MySpace.com and Facebook.com. Of course, those Web sites constitute a new form of grass-roots mass communication; the research Web site we envision will operate on a much smaller scale. Indeed, keeping the scale small and the focus limited is an impor- tant constraint—and big advantage—in our conceptual model. In the FHR Web site, informants will be members of a virtual community that forms to share information on the specific focus of the Web site, which in our test case is first-hand information and opinions about single sourcing and content management in technical communication. Members of the virtual community we envision will be those who have applied and received approval from the principal investigator running the site. Each informant will have his or her own firsthand report space that will include a detailed professional profile and an in-depth account of the person’s experience with and knowledge about the topic. Each firsthand report will be composed in response to prompts presented by the project’s principal investiga- tor. Each informant will have the option of creating a blog, which will be accessible only to other informants. The site will also have a public community message board for site members and visitors to exchange information and opin- ions about single sourcing and content management. We believe that the kind of Web site we envision has the potential to alter radically how researchers collect and make sense of firsthand accounts from research informants. The site’s principal investigator or research team will struc- ture and moderate information sharing, but any member of the community will be able to search and analyze the information collected on the Web site. Thus, the distilla- tions and interpretations of information published by the site’s research team may be supplemented, or even con- tested, by participant-investigators with different perspec- tives. The primary purpose of this article is to present our conceptual model for a firsthand reports Web site and to discuss some issues that will need to be resolved to make such a site feasible, as well as to speculate about the potential of such Web sites to provide the truly participa- tory, multivocal qualitative research that scholars in our field have envisioned and advocated for some time (Blakeslee and colleagues 1996). We begin by glossing the Manuscript received 29 March 2008; revised 16 June 2008; accepted 18 June 2008. Volume 55, Number 4, November 2008 • TechnicalCOMMUNICATION 383