Arturo Gomez
I did my research project on whether users of social media sites, such as Facebook, believe there are gender rules regarding their posts. I used three different methods in my study: surveys, personal interviews, and a focus group. I distributed a ten question survey to all my acquaintance on Facebook, which resulted in 39 completed surveys. I actually did seven face to face interviews; however, due to a technical difficulty, I lost three of them. For my focus group, I had 9 participants meet me at 5th quarter pizza near my place of employment. I knew all of the participants that took part in my interviews and focus group. Most of the people I asked to help with my project were co-workers, with a couple of outside friends thrown in. I tried to choose them based on their social media activity, since I am Facebook friends with all the people who took part in my research.
“What kinds of unwritten rules do men/women follow in posting pictures on social media” was the research question in my study. The data was split down the middle, which was surprising to me. Only 53% of the participants thought that there were unwritten rules on social media for males/females. The face to face interviews and focus groups backed the surveys, as it was a split consensus on this question. The shocking part was that the females were the ones who did not believe there are any gender rules on social media. The hypothesis for my research project was that Women/Men are primarily concerned with the content of photos that feature themselves both alone and in social settings in order to build their online and social identities. It was difficult to get people to answer this question about themselves, but they believe that other users are concerned about the content on their social media accounts. They agreed that people show only the content that will show them in a better light; yet, they would not admit to doing it themselves. This was the case in the focus group, the face to face interviews were different, as the participants were more open about their postings and their desired goals.