I have now come to the point where I need to plan my interviews, I started to make a list of people who I thought had interesting and varying opinions about how/why they constructed their online identities etc.
As this is about individuals subjective experience and is separate from my trend report, I need to decide who I am interviewing and why. As the methodology is phenomenological based ethnography, I have actively ‘followed’ and began to observe users who I find interesting and relevant for the study, I also want to interview some of my friends and peers as I am inspired by the people who surround me and feel that the conversations will be more natural and could go deeper. I know that in terms of age, I want to interview people across Generation Z as well as Millennials as they are the most active and their behaviours shape the ‘future’ of these online and offline spaces.
With the age group decided, I am having more trouble deciding on gender, I didn’t really want to pick participants based on gender but as I started composing a list of possible participants, I noticed that most of them were woman (both cis and trans women to be specific). This got me thinking about why my immediate thought about who I wanted to interview were women and I started to question whether I was introducing a bias to the study.
I am a firm believer that gender is a social construct and I have explored this in my work before, however I am also interested in what constitutes as ‘feminine’ and as I am dealing with identity projected through the concept of ‘beauty’, this typically leads towards femininity and inevitably the study of female experience. I need to establish exactly who I want to interview and why; I am interested in facial adornment, cosmetic procedures, make-up, prosthetics and wigs – and this just so happens to be a typically ‘female’ environment, I would like to find some men to interview to widen my study.