Starting my Thesis Journey: Interviews with an Emphasis on Individualized Approach

It has come to this time in our educational careers. My peers and I interested in taking the thesis journey at SDSU are putting our thesis abstracts together. I have never completed a project that requires as much diligence and focus. While this season of learning is daunting and challenging, I was excited to learn that this last week we were learning about interviews and focus groups as research methods. Specifically, the sense of organic, mutual discovery of a certain topic interested me.

With my research focus being "Finstas" (fake Instagrams) and the community engagement behind these accounts, interviews and focus groups resonated with me, as they both seek to establish insights on a specific topic. With my research focus, I decided to lean towards interviews as a qualitative approach. Finstas are personal forms of expression and may differ from user to user. This individualized nature of research led me to choose interviews as my desired method to discover individual intentions behind these private accounts. The video lecture on interviews exemplified the mutual discovery aspect of interviews as well the different types of questions in interviews. I am looking to primarily include generative questions due to the personalized experience of Finstas. These questions spark curiosity and could provide the researcher with more data on a specific phenomena. I look forward to practicing my interviewing skills and to use this method in my own research.