Studying Young People’s New Media Use: Methodological Shifts and Educational Innovations
C.J. Pascoe
This paper allowed me to better understand the affordances and some of the challenges that faced me while I was conducting my research and my interviews. While new technology does help people connect over vast spaces and with remote or isolated populations, some issues can occur. One thing Pascoe talks about however that was helpful in my research as well as my access to the online space of Tinder as well as my ability to send many people my interview questions that were not present in Oregon. Being able to expand my radius of information gathered from young people that use Tinder allowed me to get a better grip on how they are using the technology. If I had only stuck to those in my geographical location I would have had a lot less success with my understanding of Tinder. I did however conduct four personal interviews where I was able to not only see how the respondent physically reacted to the questions (body language), but I was able to go off script and ask clarifying or related questions that just popped into my head. This was one draw back of having people fill out my questionnaire and send it back to me, and for that reason I was not able to use as much of the information given because they also could have been changing their answers to sound a certain way.
Another affordance of being able to use this online space to study Tinder users was my access to the app itself. By allowing myself to spend time using the application I became more familiar with the ins and outs as well as how someone may use it outside of this study. Although I did not spend much time gathering information by using the app myself, it would open up many doors for further research on it. People could gather information over longer periods of time and have personal experience with the application.