In preparing for my second assignment survey I conducted a preliminary interview with a student from my tutorial to test out some different types of questions based on a social media theme.
Hypothesis- Social media makes it harder for people to create their own actual identity.
Do you think social media is healthy for young people?
Yea it’s a good way to connect with new and old friends and a good way to express your self, no restrictions on ways to express yourself and who you are.
How many social platforms do you use?
3, just Facebook and Instagram, snap chat, I use social media more to just browse and explore other profiles not so much to continue working on mine.
How much time and effort do you spend on your online profile?
Different sites different time, I upload more to Instagram, I try to put a photo up every 2 weeks where as Facebook is more of just a browsing tool where I can see what everyone else is doing
Why do you think people care about their social media identity so much? You don’t really know everyone online so you only way get an idea about them is through their social media identity, if they look good and share cool things online then you will assume that is what their like in real life.
Would you say your online identity accurately reflects your real identity?
Facebook is more individualized and personal and instagram is hard to properly show who you really are just through photos, a lot of people only upload photos of themselves which doesn’t really reflect what they do and who they are.
Do you think we control our social media identities or is it the other way around? Social media can dictate peoples self image and their self-confidence but it is possible to change your online persona quite easily
All of these questions are very open-ended leaving it all up to the interviewee’s own personal ideas and opinions. The methodology I used when conducting this interview was simply asking questions based around my preconceived notions of Social Media habits.
Most of the data retrieved from the interview is qualitative as it is mostly just personal opinions, theories and habits. There is a bit of quantitative data in there when referring to the amount of time spent on social media platforms daily and the amount of platforms used.
Looking back I think I could have used some more in depth questions to get more detailed responses to get a better more accurate conclusion answering the hypothesis. Personally I don’t think that social media has a very powerful role in allowing people to establish their own identity and I would need to do more research and ask some more detailed questions to come up with a significant conclusion.
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