- 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 started conducting interviews.
The first interview I conducted was just 5 minutes long. The respondent said that they do not think their Tinder profile is an authentic representation of themself, but didn’t provide much detail as to why. After this first interview, I realized that I might need to do more probing beyond the interview script to get more detailed responses. I would love for respondents to share stories during these interviews because I think those would be interesting to tell and contextualize sociologically in the podcast.
The second interview was 19 minutes long. The respondent identifies as a gay man of color and his identity was salient in his experiences on Tinder. The interview was conducted over FaceTime and the respondent naturally had more detailed responses, but I also probed them/asked a few clarifying questions. This respondent said that their profile is thoughtfully curated yet still authentic; they spent so much time on their profile because they want to authentically communicate their vibes. He also explained that he expands his radius when he is in Maine vs when he is home in NYC because there are so many less options for gay men in Maine than there are in a major city. He made an interesting comment on how Tinder lets users specify their gender and sexuality and that he doesn’t specify his because he thinks it goes unsaid since he has his setting turned on to only display men.
I also read 2 more articles and wrote their annotated bibliography entries: “Mediated Superficiality and Misogyny Through Cool on Tinder” and “‘Friends, dates and everything in between’: Tinder as a mediating technology.” The first article was interesting as it looked at the Tinder subreddit and used comments and posts as data for analysis. However, I am not sure how applicable those findings are to Dalton and I’s interview research. The second article analyzed Tinder as a mediating technology. The author did not conduct or present any original research in the article. Yet it was still a resourceful article as it considered aspects like design and data concerns which previous articles I’ve read have not. Though the articles I read this week do not research a college student/young adult sample, they still were insightful because they expanded my knowledge of Tinder to new realms (i.e. Reddit commentary) and aspects (i.e. design).
My next steps are to conduct more interviews and then transcribe them all. I’m also planning to finish up the literature review in the next week so Dalton and I have a variety of sources to refer to when working on our final presentation for the class/initial draft of our podcast script.