- 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 I read two articles: “Becoming a (Gendered) Dating App User: An Analysis
of How Heterosexual College Students Navigate Deception and Interactional Ambiguity on Dating Apps” and “What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app.” I also wrote the annotated bibliography entries for these two articles.
The research done in “Becoming a (Gendered) Dating App User: An Analysis
of How Heterosexual College Students Navigate Deception and Interactional Ambiguity on Dating Apps” is very similar to what Dalton and I hope to do. Hanson conducted 27 interviews with heterosexual men and women. At first he recruited participants and then used snowball sampling to find more people to interview. Dalton and I plan to follow the same technique: start interviewing people that we know who use Tinder then snowball to expand the sample size. This article mentioned Goffman’s dramaturgical analysis in the lit review. Hanson contextualizes the process of building one’s dating app profile within Goffman’s theory. Another interesting point from the article is that “the technical affordances of Tinder combined with the context of a college campus in that geographically based sorting matches people who already knew each other. This digital interaction is ambiguous as both users are digitally outed to each other as dating app users” (Hanson 84). I’m interested in seeing how respondents feel about being “digitally outed,” especially on a campus as small as Bowdoin’s.
In my week 8 progress notes I mentioned my interest in taking a closer look at “What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app.” This week, I did a closer read of the article. Similar to Hanson’s article, this article use Goffman’s theory of impression management to situate the findings. Goffman seems to be the go-to theoretical framework for studies of dating apps so I am inclined to do further readings of Goffman’s work for our own project. Similar to the quote I mentioned in the paragraph above, there seems to be a theme of Tinder usage being stigmatized: “‘I have friends who have relationships from Tinder but I think it’s more shameful than something to be proud of … Yes, you’re a lovely couple but you met on an application on your phone'” (Ward 1650). I’m interested to see if this is a theme that comes up in our interviews.
Dalton and I met up after reading our articles to create an interview script. Here is our tentative 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?
The next steps for the project are to conduct interviews with Bowdoin students.
Nicole,
You and Dalton have a great project here. Dating apps like Tinder have become fruitful avenues for sociological research, particularly as we continue seeing various inequalities reproduced through them (e.g., sexual racism). I think the dynamics in Maine are even more interesting, given the overall whiteness of the state. In my own encounters with locals up here, I find the racialization on these apps have a very different look — rather than overt “no Blacks,” you see people relying on sexual stereotypes. You might check out C. Winter Han’s new book “Racial Erotics” that explore some of these dynamics from the gay male perspective; Patricia Hill-Collins’ “Black Sexual Politics” might also be useful in terms of the discussion of controlling images. You have a great set of questions, that allow you to enter into the filed inductively, discovering emergent themes that help address some of your important questions. I look forward in the coming weeks to see this project develop and you topic narrow a bit.
At this juncture, it makes sense that you two will have very similar (mirror, in fact) progress notes. However, keep in mind that I am also using these notes to gauge the division of labor in this project. So hopefully, over the next several weeks, these notes will be more individualized.
Keep up the great work!