Thesis Title: Subtitle

Characteristics of the Sample: Critical Reflection

The characteristics of the sample detailed above to a certain extent mirror my own biographical characteristics. The majority of the sample is fairly young with only a third of those who answered the questionnaire circulated via Facebook behind older than 31. They are also generally well educated, with most holding a bachelors degree or some post- graduate qualification; characteristics that I also share. As would be expected most of the respondents are also located in Australia, although most of my Australia respondents were not located in Brisbane (my home city) and were scattered around the country in various states and cities. The participants who are most dissimilar to myself were several degrees removed from a personal connection to me and were generally overseas or significantly older than myself. This process of ‘separation’ from my research participants prompted me to reflect on my position within this network.
As experienced by Duncan and Edwards (1999), conducting my research within social networks gave my participants the ability to ‘check out’ the research, as well as me as a researcher and person by asking the friend who referred them for information about me, or by looking me up on Facebook. This led to a fundamentally different fieldwork experience than if I had chosen a different method of recruitment and sampling. In using my immediate network of friends on Facebook as a starting point for recruitment, my friends would recruit for me by circulating a link to a structured questionnaire through Facebook status updates. Up until this point, I had not thought too closely about whom my friends were, or who constituted my friendship circle. It appeared to be self-evident with whom I had an emotional, affective relationship; friends were people I saw regularly, liked and had intimate information about my life. I assumed that this was reflected in my ‘friend’ list on Facebook as well. As my research progressed, it became apparent that things were much less clear than I originally thought. For example, was I also friends with my friend’s partners who I rarely saw but spoke to in passing? We were friends on Facebook after all. The line between friend and acquaintance or someone I happened to know did not seem so clearly delineated. In practice, this is how affective social relationships operate. People slip between categories over time and sometimes inhabit multiple categories at any given moment. For example, a colleague can also be a friend. For the purposes of my research, I needed to define what a ‘friend’ meant to me. This was of particular importance for Facebook as it uses the word ‘friend’ as a catchall for all connections contained on Facebook. Thus to describe someone as a ‘friend on Facebook’ has entered every day language, and this expression serves as a way of distinguishing these connections from other types of friendship. Colloquially describing someone as a ‘friend’ on Facebook, generally refers to acquaintances of all types. For clarity, I defined a friend as someone
with whom I had a close, sustained and personal relationship. Doing this meant considering whether I was an insider researcher and how this position might affect the outcome of the research.
The cultural participant as insider researcher has now become relatively common across the humanities and social sciences. Brannick and Coghlan (2007: 59) define insider research as “research by complete members of organisational systems in and on their own organisations.” Insider research has also been described by Alvesson (2003) as self- ethnography; that is the researcher studies a cultural setting to which he or she have natural access, by virtue of already being a participant. Despite the fact that insider research is common there is comparatively little known about the logistics of negotiating previously established friendships in this context (Taylor 2011). Taylor’s (2011) account of negotiating friendship in the research process is one of the few that make explicit the dynamics at play when conducting intimate insider research. Understanding how intimate relationships influence the research process is very underdeveloped (Labaree 2002).
Intimate insider research is fundamentally different from friendship developed during the fieldwork process. In insider research the researcher is already known to the research population, often because of a long-standing involvement in the research environment. Friendships developed during field work are different in nature, as the researcher is not already known to those in the research environment. Friendships between researcher and the research are well documented in anthropological research; particularly feminist ethnographies (see Taylor 2011 for review).
Understanding my position as an insider researcher is helpful when considering how this research was shaped. As my research is an in-depth exploration of a social network on Facebook, I had to navigate previously existing friendships and consider how my perception of them might influence my interpretative outcomes (Taylor 2011). This also means that the boundaries between what is deemed ‘fieldwork’ and what is not are more fluid and less rigidly defined. As Taylor states, “The researcher, then, is forced to look both outward and inward, to be reflexive and self-conscious in terms of positioning, to be both self-aware and researcher-self-aware and to acknowledge the intertextuality that is a part of both the data gathering and writing processes” (2011: 9). Presently there is very limited research that considers the methodological advantages and constraints of doing research within already existing social networks.
However, it would be inaccurate to describe this research as pure insider research due to the sampling technique used. Perhaps more accurately, the strategies employed in this
research could be best described as ‘acquaintance research’, meaning that while I was known to some of those I interviewed, we did not generally participate in the same social fields. Most of the participants were not well known to me, with the exclusions of the friends who I used to begin the recruitment process. As the recruitment process continued it radiated outwards, with research participants becoming less and less familiar to me.
Some of the participants I had encountered briefly in passing through previous social engagements, but none of them were connected to me directly on Facebook nor did we habitually interact. Rather Facebook was used as a recruitment mechanism, which also happened to produce participants who were distantly known to me. Making sure I maintained a sense of distance from the participants recruited for this research was a strategic choice through which I endeavoured to minimise some familiarity of the field. As a Facebook user for 4 years at the beginning of this study I was already well-established within the field. Speaking to people whose Facebook use was not already known to me helped me approach Facebook through fresh eyes rather than relying on experiences and perspectives already well known to me.