We met with Professor Greene and expressed our concerns about the project at the moment. I felt that after every interview, I was still not satisfied with the information we were receiving. There was always more to ask and that our questions were never enough so I had trouble visualizing the finished product of this research. Professor Greene advised us to treat the project as exploratory and as something that can be worked on for future research. He told us instead to focus on what issues arise out of the interviews that we were conducting on text communication within millennials. I think I needed to hear that from Professor Greene – that we do not have to be so focused on an end goal or thesis as I had been doing in the past weeks – to accept that this research will act more as a “springboard” for more studies rather than a complete project.
Professor Greene also laid out some suggestions on how we may present our podcast. He introduced some themes such as privacy and communication in text messaging that I had not been attentive of before. Additionally, it helped hearing his ideas and perspectives through the comments on our logs to see what other information we may have been missing. Michelle and I had been struggling on how to organize our podcast and we came to the conclusion that instead of creating one long podcast where we ask all the general questions to our respondent or pair of respondents, we are concentrating each podcast from now on to reflect a theme we think is relevant to millennials’ use of text/online messaging.
On Monday April 30th, we interviewed a male international student who is also a senior and we decided to aim our attention towards privacy as the main topic of the podcast. We found that spotlighting a theme was fairly successful and we were able to gather more in-depth and insightful information by focusing on a singular idea instead of trying to touch upon many different ones. When we were following our usual list of questions, we were receiving similar responses that seemed general or obvious to other millennials. It was refreshing to hear new perceptions on another side of text/message communication that we had not mentioned before. I think it was also partly because this respondent lived in the US during the academic year but went home to China, we were able to understand how there might be some cultural differences between millennials. I am unsure whether we will even focus on how behavior or patterns might differ between millennials but it was still interesting and probably be one of those issues or challenges this research brings about – how race, gender, class, etc. may have a role in millennials’ communication.
Michelle and I have been focused on only seniors as millennials thus far but I think we would benefit trying to interview a more diverse cast of respondents. We hope to make more podcasts with international students and POC to gather more varied data.