Application Exercises

Chapter specific application exercises will help you think about research design in practice or have you explore a relevant resource.

Exercise 1: An Ethnographic Study

Review in this chapter the broad research question of how students use the Internet to find out about employment and apply for jobs. You decide that the best insights on student job hunting on the Internet will come from an in-depth ethnographic study of students as they do this. Using the Dell Hymes questions outlined in this chapter, set out your plans for such a study. It should include key informants, an outline of the observations you would make, the questions you would ask your research participants, media content that you might want to read, and any permissions that you might need to obtain before your study begins.

Exercise 2: An Interview

You are interested in how exactly a student might go about using the Internet to locate jobs and apply for them. Assuming that a structured interview with specific questions is the best way to get this information, write out the specific questions you would want to ask a student you know to be highly experienced in the art of the online job search.

Exercise 3: Understanding Social Media Stress

A Pew Research Center Internet, Science & Tech Project study (Hampton, Rainie, Lu, Shin, & Purcell, 2015) looked at the relationship between social media use and stress. Overall, the researchers found that frequent Internet and social media users do not have higher levels of stress, but there are circumstances under which the use of social media increases awareness of stressful events in the lives of others. Especially for women, this greater awareness is tied to higher levels of stress.

The study used an established scale called the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) that is based on people’s answers to 10 questions.

Suppose you wish to explore the relationship between social media use and stress. Which of the approaches discussed in this chapter would you prefer, and why? What advantages might they offer relative to surveys or experiments?