Description:
<jats:p> Qualitative online inquiries are being used more and more but their use has been little methodologically refined so far. This is already true for a systematic differentiation between asynchronous/synchronous and oral/written varieties of communication and their specific benefits when we use them as qualitative research instruments. In this note, we focus on the methodological benefits of asynchronous online communication between absent communication partners with a time lag. Before doing so, we discriminate between synchrony and asynchrony in (human) social interaction and arrange them on a continuum of decreasing action cues and conceptual speech elements. </jats:p>