Thesis Title: Subtitle

Interviewing

Interviewees were selected from those who indicated in the structured questionnaire that they were interested in participating further. Participants who completed the questionnaire and then indicated an interest in participating further in the research were then contacted via email to arrange an interview. In the process of concluding the interview, participants were asked if they would be willing to post a link to the questionnaire on their Facebook to their friends; further diversifying the sample from my original network. All but one participant agreed to do this. This new posting elicited a new wave of participants, with whom the same process was repeated. This staggered recruitment continued until 30 participants were recruited for the qualitative elements of this research. On commencing the third wave of recruitment, it became apparent that female participants were considerably over-represented in my sample. Using my social networks, I focused on recruiting male participants to interview and observe. This process was moderately successful, and resulted in a distribution that largely mirrors the ratio of male to female respondents in the questionnaire; 80 percent women, and 20 percent men. Difficulty in recruiting male participants for studies examining friendship is documented in the literature (Butera 2006) and my experience was in keeping with these accounts. Of all respondents who took the survey, 27.1% expressed interest in being further involved with the study.
The interviews conducted in this research were produced via semi-structured interviewing. Semi-structured interviewing is particularly well suited to generate data about situationally specific social processes such as Facebook (Manson 2006). As I was interested in participants’ understandings of Facebook, interviewing gave me a way to access these accounts. Following the critical realist ontology of this research, participants’ views and accounts of Facebook are particularly important as they provide the means through which I accessed and interpreted the social structures and mechanism relevant to the social phenomena under study.