This paper aims to shine a light on how an interpretive case study qualitative is being used in understanding the effectiveness of government e-procurement implementation and use contexts. Our study is based on a case of social media discussion and posting on government e-procurement implementation and use in Indonesian regency. We collected data from e-procurement users’ social media exchange, postings, and conversations posted by local businessmen and companies and from offline in-depth interviews with implementers. The findings show that social media observation can be used as research setting to enhance understanding of a topic being studied and as a medium for triangulation in an interpretive study. Our study also proves that using social media in interpretive study can reduce challenge in participants’ recruitment, access to study sites, and bias in interviews. More importantly, data from social media can enrich and verify offline interview data. While this study contributes to online interpretive research, the data was collected from online participants whose identities are difficult to verify. The data neither was validated with face to face interview. The use of social media for an interpretive study also raises an ethical dilemma because we observe and draw content from posted material in an online setting without users’ consent. This needs to consider new ethical issue by exploring ethic discourse in social media study.
Keywords: Case Study, E-Procurement, Social media, interpretive research, research approach
