Using social media has become a common practice of today’s generation, social media like Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat offer an endless portal of communication and entertainment and have grown exponentially in recent years. The aim of this study was to examine the views of the generation that were born into a world without social media but then went through their teenage years experiencing social media platforms as they rapidly expanded. Research was carried out on three students from York St John University in the form of interviews lasting 30-40 minutes, using a range of open questions that could later be used in a thematic analysis. Using thematic analysis three interview transcripts were examined with reference to three main themes within social media, communication, narcissism and safety. The analysis suggests that the primary function of social media is that it helps people all over the world communicate with each other, notably within the areas of long distance friendships, natural disasters and aid workers.
‘Happy to post things on snapchat because it will be gone in 24 hours’: A thematic analysis of experiences on social media.
The emergence of social media has created a new avenue for facilitating daily information and communication needs. As technology improves and expands our range of communication, social media I becoming more of a vital tool for daily social interaction. With the shift from face-to-face conversations to instantaneous responses through screens, it could mean missing out on being in the moment or loose the ability to be able to sense how someone really feels. (Paul Mihailidis, 2014)
Everyday social media is attracting a considerable amount of interest in the younger generations. They now think of themselves as exceptionally talented, remarkable and successful based on the approval they get from posts on social media, a typical behaviour more commonly referred to as narcissism. Using social media becomes a risk to teenagers more often than most adults realise. Most risks develop through lack of understanding of online privacy; peer pressure; inappropriate content; and outside influences from third party advertising groups.
Given the importance of these issues it’s interesting to see how previous research has failed to address a crucial part of social media with regards to previous experiences from young adults who have lived through the ever changing times of technology. The present study aims to investigate this by carrying out interviews that will later be used in a thematic analysis. There are many benefits to using thematic analysis, its ability to be flexible stemming from a particular theoretical or epistemological position is one of them. It’s a useful research tool, which can potentially provide a rich and detailed, yet complex account of data. (Holloway,I., & Todres, L.2003)
Method
Participants
There were three female participants who took part in the study all British students studying at York St John University. All were female undergraduates in their second year of study and all their early twenties. Sally, a female undergraduate student in her early twenties. Sally, Alice and Nicole didn’t get smart phones until their late teens so wouldn’t have had early access to social media during childhood. Sally’s favourite social media platform was Instagram because she liked being able to show all her followers her creative side, whereas Alice and Nicole preferred Facebook overall due to its easy access to everything they needed. Sally stated the on average she uses social media for 6 plus hours, Alice used hers for 4 hours of the day and Nicole used hers for most of the day. I carried out an opportunity sample using participants available at the time that fitted into the research criteria, due to this method of selection of participants it would inevitably shape the sample in a certain way, however further research may wish to explore similar issues with different kinds of participants.
Interviews
The interview questions were exclusively designed for the purpose of this study, see Appendix 1 for interview schedule. Participants were asked to recall experiences of social media throughout their childhood/teenage years. A set of 21 open questions were used to measure the different experiences on social media. The interview questions were designed to establish what social media platforms the participants preferred and why, how safe they feel privacy settings are, and how much they feel it influences their lives now. Semi-structured interviews were done to allow me as the interviewer to be prepared and appear competent during the interview, whilst allowing participants the freedom to express their views in their own terms. This further increases the chances of collecting reliable and comparable qualitative data. According to Bernard (1988), its best to use semi-structured interviews when you won’t get another chance to interview the same person again or if you send several interviewers out into the field to collect data. Each interview lasted between 17minutes – 24 minutes long depending on how much detail participants when into.
Ethics
In the BPS code of conduct, it states three important ethical guidelines I considered when carrying out my study, protection from harm, informed consent and the right to withdraw (BPS guidelines). Throughout my data collection participant’s want to be assured that their data will remain secure and all information supplied will remain confidential.
With regards to protection from harm, potential risks to participants psychological well-being or personal values were eliminated by avoiding asking questions such as ‘Have you ever been cyber bullied over social media?’ this ensured that participant’s felt at ease throughout the interview and didn’t feel uncomfortable at any point.
Informed consent was obtained through a signed document stating the standardised instructions of the interview, what the data was being used for and that the participant’s understood that they would remain anonymous throughout the data analysis stage. This guideline was carried out by using pseudonyms throughout the report write up process and any recording of the interviews would be destroyed after data collection.
Participants right to withdraw was also mentioned in the signed document, so they understood that at any point throughout the interview or even after data analysis process they could withdraw their data from any analysis at it would be destroyed without question.
Analytic Procedure
Some key decisions identified through an ongoing reflexive dialogue, before and throughout the analytical procedure are discussing inductive analysis and semantic themes. An inductive approach means that themes suggest there is a strong link to the data itself. In this case my data was collected through an interview, implying that there’s somewhat of a relationship between the questions participants were being asked, and the themes identified afterwards. This process of inductive analysis is a way of collecting coded data without actually putting a pre-existing coding frame in place, its therefore data driven (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
Another decision to take into account was at what level I was going to be processing this data at. When semantically processing my data themes, it entailed me looking for key statements or surface meanings that participant’s gave throughout the interview, usually take from transcripts. The data is then described and interpreted in an attempt to find significant patterns and broader meanings (Patton, 1990).
During the analytical process, I followed a set of stages developed by (Howitt, 2010). The first stage was carrying out a verbal transcription of my interviews ensuring there’s a level of detail in my transcriptions. Secondly was familiarising myself with all three data sets and highlighting in different colours initial thoughts and repeating patterns. The third stage included searching for themes, I did this by writing out key semantic themes found in all three data sets onto different coloured flash cards. The fourth stage was refining and reviewing all statements and my key words identified. Finally, the fifth stage included creating the main theme names, I came up with three main themes throughout my data, they included, communication, narcissism and safety.
Analysis
The thematic analysis process that was applied to the transcripts elicited key concepts that were evident in the data. These themes are viewed as essential in determining the experinces of all the participants towards social media. These themes have been labelled as “communication,” “narcissism,” and “Safety.” Thomas (2003) points out that ‘most inductive studies report a model that has between 3 and 8 main findings’. There are of course aspects of the participants’ understandings that overlap across these themes. This, however, should be viewed as a good interpretation of understandings and attitudes in general, which are never made up of isolated concepts but are all relative to each other. This analysis will be a full account of all the analysis collected with regard to three themes.
Communication
Of the three themes, here I present the theme communication that was addresses the most throughout the analysis process due to there being 7 comparison statements being drawn across all the data sets. A common thread through various narratives of the participant’s was their reference’s to keeping in touch with family abroad and friends that have gone off to university, a privileged that the older generations could only have ever done via a letter in the mail. ‘I have a lot of family in India and Australia so it’s easy like for me and my family communicate’ (Nicole: 25,26) ‘Keeping in touch with friends that I’ve like met on holiday or family abroad’ (Sally: 15,16)
Narcissism
In terms of the perceived level of influence, narcissism experiences on social media were mentioned frequently throughout the interviews.
‘Well because it’s a popularity contest isn’t it? Who can have the most followers.’ (Alice: 34,35)
‘People try their hardest to look their best and portray their lives’ (Nicole: 31,32)
Safety
This theme encapsulates each of the participants’ feelings towards how safe social media really is and how privacy settings are becoming harder and harder to use. Nowadays its becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with all the new software updates with new features and filers. The participants even in their early twenties expressed the inability to understand how a lot of the privacy settings on these social media apps work. ‘On snapchat I just found out we have snap-maps so like if I just found out, a lot of young children won’t know what it is let alone how to turn it off so anyone they have on snapchat can track their every move’ (Nicole:54,55,56).
‘there is also stuff you may not always necessarily want to see, like violent videos’ (Alice: 84,85)
Conclusion
In conclusion using the thematic analysis for interview data enabled me to categorise experiences on social media identifying three key themes. This confirmed the notion by Braun and Clarke (2006) that it is appropriate to choose a method of analysis that is driven by the research questions. These themes could later have practical implications such as helping parents to understand why their children behave in a certain way towards social media in terms of communication and narcissism and help them to understand safety aspects and age restrictions of using online social media. Given the small sample I was carrying out it was inevitable that the sample would be limiting and research implications suggest that the themes found in my data have specific relevance to gratifications received from users of social media and should therefore be given more prominence if future researchers choose to carry out further investigating