- 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?
Week 8
This week, Dalton and I created a plan for our data collection and methods. We also identified 15 scholarly articles that we might use for our literature review/annotated bibliography.
When writing our data and methods section, we started to reevaluate the form of our project. Initially, we had planned to conduct video interviews with respondents and include interview clips in a video essay. I think that it can be scary for respondents to be vulnerable and fully share in an interview when they know their face and identity will be revealed to an audience. Dalton and I discussed possibly switching the form of our project to a podcast. This way, we can read quotes from our respondents while protecting their anonymity.
I am particularly excited about the article “What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app.” This article got me thinking about how we can connect theory to our research on Tinder. I’m interested in situating our findings within Goffman’s theory of impression management. I want to craft questions for our interviews that probe interviewees to share the process of curating their Tinder profiles and their in-app interactions. However, I am wary of applying the findings from this article to our research because the results of this article are from interviews with Tinder users in the Netherlands. Are Tinder experiences universal? Are there cultural gaps and differences between Tinder usage an American campus vs. Dutch society?
The next steps for our project will be closely reading these scholarly articles and writing annotations for the annotated bibliography, finalizing our interview script, and starting to conduct our interviews.