The availability, affordability and usability of communication technologies have created new ways to conduct interpersonal qualitative research. Access to digital communications remains uneven, but the online environment provides an alternative, and at times a potentially preferable, research space. As Covid-19 has interrupted and disrupted the dominant assumption that qualitative research must be conducted in person, this paper outlines possibilities and reservations of online interpersonal methods. Though the standard ethical considerations of qualitative research hold true, we argue that these are necessary, but often inadequate, in the contexts of conducting online synchronous interpersonal research. Through centring relational and reflexive practice, we consider the associated pragmatic, methodological and ethical domains from feminist and virtual–material positional perspectives. Unpacking the complexities and possibilities of researching digital environments, we present six guiding principles to inform ethically responsive, methodologically robust and pragmatically feasible approaches to conducting online interpersonal qualitative research.

A general isoperimetric inequality for the collapse loads of uniformly loaded, edge supported rigid-plastic plates of arbitrary shape is established. The inequality provides a lower bound to this load and involves just the length of the perimeter and the area of the collapsing region of the plate. This paper establishes a proof, under certain restrictions, of this inequality which to-date has been just a conjecture.