- Description of Methods
We will use a snowball sample for identifying participants for our interviews; we will start interviewing friends that we know use the app and then snowball to get more participants. Our literature review will largely inform the interview script. Tentatively, here are some questions we are interested in asking:
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- Tell me about your experiences using Tinder on Bowdoin’s campus.
- Have you ever gone on a date with someone from Tinder?
- Have you ever hooked up with someone from Tinder?
- How does Tinder usage differ for the queer community?
- Are campus social divisions (the athlete/non-athlete divide) reproduced on Tinder?
We will audio record each interview, and then transcribe it so we can pull/read quotes while retaining anonymity for our participants.
- Description of Data
- Plan of collecting data.
- Date, Changes, Reasons
We will collect qualitative data, conducting 8-15 interviews with Bowdoin students. We plan to finish collecting data by April 22, 2022. For the first 3 weeks of April, Dalton and I will split up the interviews and conduct them individually.
During this time, we will also begin working on a literature review on how Tinder usage intersects with gender, class, and race more broadly to guide our interview questions, and we hope to have each looked at five articles that we will use for our final paper and begin building our personal annotated bibliographies, totalling to ten articles by April 15, 2022.
Update as of 5/4/22
I conducted 5 interviews with students at Bowdoin College. Here is the interview script Dalton and I used for our interviews:
- 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?