After our last interview with Julianna and David, Bettina and I began to talk about the progression of our research project. I found it extremely challenging to think about the interviewee’s responses as mind-blowing or thought-provoking because of my positionality as a fellow millennial. I think that is why Bettina and I had difficulty conceptualizing what the big take-away of our research project would be.
We spoke to Professor Greene about the challenges we were facing, and he advised us to distance ourselves from the data and analyze it from a non-millennial perspective. Professor Greene also recommended that we approach our project as an exploratory research that can act as a “springboard” for future research. Using the data from students’ interviews, Bettina and I plan on critically analyzing the challenges posed by new forms of text communication. We plan on answering the following questions in our analysis…
- What kind of issues/challenges/anxieties arise as a result of using text communication as the dominant form of communication?
- What are the consequences of text language as a form of communication?
- Is texting/text language the most effective means of communicating?
We also talked to Professor Greene about the organization/layout of our podcast. Bettina and I had initially planned on creating one long podcast, organized by themes, that used snippets from everyone’s interviews. After our discussion with Professor Greene we decided it would be best if we created a series of mini podcasts instead in order to preserve the richness of the conversations we had with student pairs. Our mini podcasts will each have a theme that deals with millennials’ use of text communication (including on social media): Presentation of the Self; Privacy; Tone/Emotion; Cultural/Social Capital. Depending on the content of the interview, Bettina and I might present the mini podcasts as a three-part series.
Another concern of ours was the demographic of our interviewees. Bettina and I have only been interviewing seniors, which we recognize is not representative of the entire millennial generation. We are trying to expand our demographics by interviewing more international students and students of color. However, the demographic of our interviewees is definitely one of the biggest limitations of our research.
Moving forward, we plan on conducting more pair interviews so that the interviewees feel more comfortable bouncing ideas off of each other. I like and prefer structuring the interview/podcast as more of a story-telling opportunity because I think it allows the interviewees to share more intimate, unique experiences. I noticed that we were hearing very similar, simple responses when we strictly followed our standard list of interview questions.
OTHER ACTIVITIES…
We’ve scheduled another interview with two international students, both seniors, this Monday (April 30). I’m interested to see what they have to say about text communication as a form of social and cultural capital. Bettina and I confirmed that we were both doing five annotated bibliographies each. We are still in the process of collecting scholarly articles and books on the topic of text communication