- 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 continued my content analysis of TikTok and various videos and pages. I have been analyzing videos and collecting data by searching the keyword “fitness.” As I scroll through the videos that come up under that search criteria, I look for videos that are in a fitness setting, like a gym. I have found hundreds of videos and will continue to sift through them into next week.
I have been keeping a tally of the observed race of the different content creators and as of right now, the majority of the fitness influencers that I have looked at have been white. Though this is not a surprise, I am curious to see if the representation of different races within fitness TikTok will change as I continue my research. I have also been observing the different outfit choices and camera angles of the videos I compiled and they are aligning with what I hypothesized would be the case. Most of the videos seem to fulfill the male gaze to some capacity. I have been looking at these videos individually but I am going to go back through and do a more comparative analysis of the videos to identify trends and themes among the ones that I have selected and which videos appear to follow the male gaze more than others and what the reasoning is behind that.
After I finish my content analysis and cross analyze the videos that I have collected, I will move into my literature review and see what other studies may draw comparisons to my own work. If I see fit, I will take the information that I find from these studies and reassess my content analysis to complete a more comprehensive project plan heading into week 5.