Angie Torres & Paolo Cui-Garcia
Instagramification
The methods we used for our paper were surveys, interviews, and focus groups. In order for someone to be considered a valuable source for our study, they needed to fit our criteria: people who use Instagram regularly- check it daily and post one to multiple times a week. We received 95 usable surveys, 4 interviews, and 2 focus groups. For all of these, we asked people we knew met the criteria through our networks, texted them, and called them. We each scheduled interviews and then separate focus groups. Our research question was “how and why do people use Instagram to communicate?” With the responses we saw a variety of different ways that people communicated, but the main one was to stay in touch with friends and family, and to follow people with similar interests. Our hypothesis was that people primarily use Instagram to perform their identity. It seems that some people do use Instagram to create a certain version of them or only share parts of their life to create an identity. This was supported more so from our interviews and focus groups because we got more detail and were able to probe with follow up questions whereas in the surveys we couldn’t really. Basically our research was able to show what we believed- people perform their identity on Instagram whether it be by who they choose to follow, the pictures they post, or who/how they communicate on Instagram.