Conceptualization of the Phenomenon of Subjectness of the Network Community Using a Grounded Theory Method

The study of the characteristics of network communities is due to the increasingly complete transition of social life into the Internet space. Subjectness is a key psychological characteristic of a community that manifests itself in its discourse. The method of grounded theory as one of the most advanced methods in the coding paradigm allows conceptualizing the phenomenon of subjectness of network communities by analyzing their discourse. The article shows how this method is consistently used and how the problems associated with the psychological interpretation of constructs generated from the “empirical field” are overcome. So the problem of the diversity manifestations of subjectness was solved by subjective scaling of the contribution of substantive codes during the reconstruction of the structure of implicit ideas about the subjectness of the network community. Further iterations in the process of constructing a ground theory and the development of a short list of discursive markers of subjectness led to the inclusion methods for comparing factor structures. The analysis of the trolling process made it possible to introduce into the developed model of subjectness the ideas about current and potential components.