In line with some of the most-cited research and traditions of qualitative data analysis, this research follows the interpretative approach to deriving conclusions from detailed interviews (e.g., Thompson, Locander, & Howard, 1990) and ethnographic or netnographic data (e.g., Belk, Sherry, & Wallendorf, 1988; Belk, Wallendorf & Sherry 1989; Kozinets, 2002; 2010). At the interview, respondents were asked to sign a consent form (Appendix II) allowing observation of their personal social media sites and use of the interview data. Respondents were added to a Facebook profile under the username of ‘online consumer research’ in order to conduct retrospective netnography (Kozinets, 2010). The interviews lasted an average of two hours, ranging from one-and-a-half to two-and-a-half hours. A quarter of the length of interview was conducted without the use of computers, during which respondents were allowed to get comfortable and speak about their life, family, friends, jobs, priorities, hobbies, goals, fears and interests.
The remaining part of the interview took place in front of a computer in which
respondents were asked to take the interviewer through their Facebook activity and thoughts, starting from the moment they logged onto their accounts.
Conducting the interview in front of the computer was necessary to allow respondents to quickly refer to the incidents they spoke about, and to allow the researcher to understand the usage of respondents. Interviewing respondents and reviewing their profile activity has simultaneously been used in previous research to allow respondents to reflect on their activity (Zhao et al., 2013). Additionally, this approach allows the researcher to understand the meaning that respondents assign to the observed phenomenon (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). Moreover, since the context of this study is personal social media sites, not using a computer during the interview would only provide a partial and hypothetical picture. This technique created contradictions in some instances between what respondents said they felt and what they actually felt. For example, Jace was certain that getting ‘likes’ and ‘comments’ and other directed communication (Burke, Marlow, & Lento, 2010) on his Facebook page did not mean anything to him, yet squealed in delight upon seeing comments on a particular picture of himself. This also allows the researcher a glimpse into the naturalistic context of the respondent’s consumption of her/his own social media content.
The interview questions were not structured before the interview, but the interviewer had documents with broad categories containing open-ended questions that could simultaneously allow the respondent to tell her or his story and allow the interviewer to guide the interview (Appendix III). The total transcribed interviews consisted of 412 pages.
In addition to the long interviews, netnographic data was collected. Netnography a form of online ethnography applied to the online context to study the online social world and culture (Kozinets, 2002). Netnography comprises participant observational data through online fieldwork in order to understand cultural phenomenon (Kozinets, 2010).
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Netnography has been used widely in research on online consumption. For example, Giesler (2006) studied gift-giving systems in the context of peer to peer sharing and Nelson and Otnes (2005) study on intercultural wedding message boards using netnography. Additionally, Kozinets, de Valck, Wojnicki and Wilner (2010) used netnography to study the changing narratives within networks of bloggers and followers. The use of this methodology provides a rich cultural level understanding of consumption and creation of content online, contrary to content analytic approaches that put the researcher at a distance and can lead to shallow cultural understanding. In this study, the researcher was an unobtrusive observer as the site of observation is a personal domain for the respondents, although the level of involvement and engagement by researchers can vary in netnography as in ethnography (Kozinets, 2010).
The interviews were combined with observation of the respondents’ personal social media sites in order to understand the meaning the respondent assigns to the observed phenomenon (Corbin & Strauss, 2008). An example of the Facebook ‘News Feed’ that includes content that two of the respondents had posted is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Facebook ‘News Feed’ with respondent’s activity.
The ‘News Feed’ on Facebook was introduced in 2006; the function tracks any changes on the profiles of Facebook friends and aggregates the changes in a single, prominently placed space (Lampe, Ellison, & Steinfield, 2008). Facebook also allows viewing posts that the respondents have commented on, or ‘liked’, indicating consumption of Facebook content. Moreover, conducting netnography would show what users post and share on their Facebook, but does not allow the researcher a glimpse into what they have consciously not shared. Thus long interviews and netnographic research together are necessary to develop a deeper understanding of selective content creation for mood management through selective consumption and non-consumption of content.
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Therefore, netnography is relevant as the context of study entails a significant element of cultural research; thus, longitudinal observation of the respondents’ social media sites complements the long interview data. In this study, I only observed the Facebook profiles of the respondents, as it was the only social media site used actively and frequently by all the respondents. With a username of ‘online consumer research’ I added the respondents to the research Facebook profile and continuously observed changes and previous activity to facilitate a more robust understanding of their Facebook usage. The role of the researcher was that of an unobtrusive observer. In my Facebook profile, any identifying information other than a name was removed, and the
‘Friend List’ was not visible to anyone in the network. Therefore, the respondents were not able to identify who the other subjects in this study were. During a period of eight months, 283 pages of field notes were gathered, which included screenshots of Facebook activity organized by date and supplemented with notes.
The data was collected and analysed iteratively, which the following section details. To analyse the collected data the interpretative tradition of hermeneutic phenomenology was applied, which is presented in the following section.