Thesis Title: Subtitle

Conducting the Interviews

As part of the interviewing process, interviewees were given the choice as to whether they preferred to be interviewed via Skype, phone, instant messaging (IM), or face-to-face. Due to the nature of my recruitment strategy, interviewing all participants face-to-face was not feasible because my sample was spread interstate and overseas. While there was an approximately equal distribution between phone, IM and face-to-face interviews, none of my interviewees chose to be interviewed via Skype (video calling). Allowing this degree of flexibility allowed participants to pick a communication medium with which they felt comfortable. Face-to-face interviews were recorded with a digital voice recorder, and then transcribed by me or a professional transcription service. Face-to-face interviews took place at a location chosen by the participants. This was always either a café on The University of Queensland campus, or in the greater Brisbane area.

Phone interviews also took place via Skype on a laptop computer. In addition to video calling Skype has the facility to call landline and mobile phone numbers. These calls took place in a quiet and private area of my home at a time chosen by the participant. Calls were recorded with AudioHijack, software that is able to digitally record audio from computer programs. As with the face-to-face interviews these were also transcribed by a professional transcription service or by me. Interviews conducted via IM took place over the interviewees’ preferred IM service. Participants chose to utilise the IM function of either Skype or Facebook. As these interviews were already text, they did not required further transcription. As the interviews were transcribed verbatim and in their entirety using the participants’ exact words and the connections between their responses to my questions and between topics were preserved. This provided a starting point from which to follow themes across the various types of data as well as providing a solid basis for grounding theory.

At the start of each interview, I opened with a very general question about how long they had been members of Facebook. I then asked if they could remember why they signed up. None of my participants were early adopters of Facebook and only joined Facebook due to an increasing number of invitations generated by Facebook. When users joined Facebook for the first time they were encouraged to find their friends among existing Facebook users, or if their contacts were not on Facebook to send an automatically generated email to everyone in their address book. Asking participants why they signed up to Facebook led

to more general discussion about the experience of being on Facebook, particularly the experience of having different social circles on Facebook. When I commenced the interviewing process I expected frequent accounts of ‘drama’ on Facebook. To my surprise virtually none were forthcoming. This was dramatically out of step with my day-to-day interactions with others, who upon discovering my research topic usually told me an anecdote (either first or second hand) of interpersonal tension on Facebook. When I specifically probed my participants about this, they usually drew a blank, or offered a benign example, for example de-friending an old boss, and then running into her in person. In this example, neither the former employer nor the participant mentioned the defriending and the experience was categorised as slightly awkward. This may be reflective of my sample, which while generally ‘young’ was older that the youth demographics most commonly studied in Facebook research. What surprised me about the interviewing experience was the level of pragmatism with which participants viewed Facebook. When I began interviewing Facebook was a well-established technology and participants seemed to have a well-developed grasp of what Facebook was ‘for’ – for example keeping in touch with friends - and they frequently emphasised how ‘easy’ Facebook made communication.