Progress Notes: Week 09

• Between weeks 8 and 14, each student should provide a weekly reflection (500 words) on the data you have collected to date.
  • What data did you collect?
  • What is your initial impression of the data?
  • How have the data you have collected this week changed/progressed your thinking about your research project?
  • What challenges did you encounter while collecting the data?
  • What are your next steps?

This week Nicole and I met to work on our interview script for the final project. We spent the meeting going over questions and thoughts we had from our first rounds of readings and came up with a rough draft for our interview script. We are planning on plugging ahead on the readings and updating our questions as needed as the time goes on, but we want to start scheduling people to interview as the year gets busier.

Here is our first round of questions for the interview script. We plan to add/adjust as we do more readings. The first part of questions are more general questions, and then the second half of the questions relate to the readings and Goffman’s theory on presentation. As I was doing the readings,

Interview script:

How old are you? How do you define your sexuality? How do you define your gender? How do you define your race?

Why did you download Tinder? What were your intentions when first downloading the app? Have they changed?

What type of people are you looking for on Tinder? What parameters/preferences do you have set?

Do you think your Tinder profile is an authentic representation of yourself?

Do you believe you spent a lot of time creating your profile? Or was it quick?

What information have you provided on your profile and what information have you left out?

Why do you think someone would be interested in matching with you on Tinder?

Have you targeted your Tinder presentation towards a certain group?

What do you want people to think when they see your Tinder profile?

What has been your experience with Tinder at Bowdoin or in Brunswick? Have you ever met a Tinder match in-person?

Do you think there a stigma around using Tinder on Bowdoin’s campus?

Have you used Tinder elsewhere (such as your home area) and how does using the app differ there than here?

Do you think of Tinder as a dating app or a hookup app?

I also worked on my first two articles for the literature review and started working on my annotated bibliography entries. I am looking forward to exploring more of how gay men in particular interact with and use Tinder with hopefully more contemporary sources (though it is crazy how this source is only six years old but is somewhat outdated because of the rapid change of technology). Mackee’s app touched on some interesting information in terms of how gay men perceive the app, particularly in contrast to other apps used for gay dating or hookups. 

These are some of the questions that came up particularly in relation to the Freddy Mackee article:

What does it mean for gay men to use an app created for straight people? Does this mean that straight apps are more designed for relationships and move away from hook-up culture? Why can’t gay apps be more similar to tinder? How does the role of these apps change by region? 

Is Tinder a hookup app now? How has the app changed since this was written? No more Facebook linking? 

The second article by Hanson touched a lot on how Tinder related directly to college students, and I was interested in what the author described as the stigma of the app as well as how male and female students had differing opinions on the app.