A Preliminary Qualitative Analysis of Home Schooling on Stormfront

Abstract

In recent years, attention to radicalization has focused in on how extremist ideology may be replicated within the family, and passed on intergenerationally (Avdeenko & Siedler, 2017; Riany et al, 2018) Little research explores radicalization within the family unit itself (Spalek, 2016). To gain insight into extremist family units, qualitative methodology was used to explore online posts pertaining to family on Stormfront, a prominent white supremacist website. This project followed case study methodology. A webcrawler was used to collect posts from the board. Thematic analysis was used to organize and analyze data. Homeschooling was found to be a prominent topic within education; all posts within the homeschooling domain were brought under further analysis to derive their intended purpose for further understanding their context. Three themes were identified within the data: Replicating White Nationalist Framing, A Call for Urgency, and Academic White Flight. The analysis of the posts’ purpose revealed that majority of posts, 73%, were intended to find or share resources for homeschooling.