Angelica Cabrera and Maya Joshi

Comm 151I Executive Summary

Our research was conducted to answer the question “what kind of unwritten rules do women follow in posting pictures on social media?” It turned out that not a lot of women pay much attention to the content of their photos as long as it was something that they liked and made them feel confident. We found that some women payed attention to what time they posted and sometimes would get approval of a caption or maybe a filter.

We hypothesized that women would be primarily concerned with how they are presented in pictures of just themselves and them in social settings in order to build their online and social identity. We chose this topic because we are women and so we can relate to the topic. It is also interesting to us because we all have our own rule for posting on Instagram and we wanted to explore the reasons why other women post the pictures that they do. We originally thought that women would care a lot more about how they posted on Instagram. What we found was that a lot of people simply post pictures that they like, but in some cases they would get approval of a caption or filter. There also weren’t that many rules that they used for posting. We thought that more women would pay attention to the times they posted, but very few did. The biggest rule that a majority of the women went by was to stay classy on Instagram.

We conducted surveys, focus groups, and interviews to get our results. Our age range for the research was 18-25. 82 surveys were conducted to female college students within the ages of 18-25. Two focus groups were also conducted with women in the same age range, but the questions were more insightful than the surveys. It was conversational and the girls seemed interested in the topic. We also conducted 8 interviews with questions that were more probing and went into much more detail. We took women from our focus group who seemed very interested in the topic to get more in depth information from them. For each method, we asked them as an activity to check their last post and take us through their process.