- 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 finished data collection and conducted my final 2 interviews.
The first interview was 10 minutes long. The respondent shared how at Bowdoin, she swipes right on people she knows in passing, but not close friends or strangers. She also talked about how she feels that Tinder is stigmatized. This respondent was the only respondent of the 5 I interviewed to believe this. She acknowledged that as a white woman, it’s easy for her to fit into the beauty standard, if she doesn’t always feel that way.
The second interview was 20 minutes long. The respondent shared how he thinks of Tinder like a game with its cards and dopamine rush. I definitely want to quote him on that and tie it to literature that discusses the gamification of Tinder. He also talked about how Tinder provides people with the sort of validation that others get from social media like Instagram.
Both interviewees stressed Tinder’s emphasis on looks. For the question “Why do you think someone would be interested in matching with you on Tinder?” both answered that they think people swipe right on them because of their physical appearance.
After finishing our interviews, Dalton and I met up and started to pull quotes from our interviews and the articles/books we read for our literature review to start writing a script for the podcast.
The next steps for the project are to continue writing and editing the podcast script and then recording the podcast for the final product.