PRATHIBAA RAMESH

Executive Summary / Abstract

For my WOW! Attachment, I was attached to Dr. Lim Wee Kiat (LWK001). With his help, we conducted a study based on the question; “What are the trends that GenZ born in 2004 & 2005 popularize on social media in 2018 & 2019? Why these trends?”. At the end of the project, we presented a 3000-word report and a poster. We also presented our findings to Dr. Lim and our peers using the poster.

Background Information on the projects/tasks involved

The project was mainly to give us an insight into Sociology and to identify the difference between Social Sciences and Applied Social Sciences. The value of this project was that it gave us the freedom to explore what we wanted without much restriction. Therefore, we were able to delve deeper into topics that we have not been able to analyze in other projects. This freedom is what encouraged us to conduct a study on a topic we have always wanted to do. Moreover, since we had Dr. Lim’s guidance, we were able to produce a study that was meaningful.

The topic that my group and I wanted to discuss was the relationship between the Gen Z generation and popular trends. We wanted to find out why this generation popularizes trends so much and why specifically these trends. Hence, with Dr. Lim’s help, we crafted our inquiry question: “What are the trends that GenZ born in 2004 & 2005 popularize on social media in 2018 & 2019? Why these trends?”.

Elaboration/Record of tasks done

This process includes conducting our preliminary research, followed by fieldwork, analyzing our results, and lastly drawing our conclusion based on these results. This process is very systematic and allows us enough time to space out our work within the 4 weeks we have. The rationale behind this process is to guide us to produce a quality end product. We foresaw that the challenges would include spending too much time on one aspect of the project and underestimating the amount of time required for other parts of the project. This eventually did happen to our group, as we thought that we could finish this project within 2 weeks. However, as we worked on the project, we realized that 2 weeks was definitely not enough, and we are thankful that we had more time. On hindsight, we had spent too much time on our preliminary research such that we did not have enough time for our interviews, causing us to rush through our interviews and analysis.

Elaboration / record of results / deliverables / impact of work done

We started off with our literature review, where we focused mainly on 4 questions: 1) What is the average amount of time teenagers aged 15-16 years old spend on social media? 2) What is the most prevalent age group on social media? 3) Why do teenagers use social media so much? and 4) What matters most to teenagers at the age of 15-16 years old? These questions helped us to justify the reason why we decided to focus specifically on those who are 15 to 16-year-old rather than any other age group. Using this information, we were also able to identify a trend that would help us for our study.

We then moved on to work on collecting empirical evidence through surveys and interviews. Our survey was named ‘Investigating social media trends through generations’. This survey was short, with only 6 questions, so that it would be easier for our respondents to answer them, as a long survey may result in them losing interest easily. Moreover, we structured the majority of our questions to be open-ended, but with guidelines on how to answer the question. This made it easier to analyze our results and identify a trend. We sent the survey out via Instagram and Whatsapp and also asked some of our peers to share it with the people we were not able to reach ourselves. As for our interview, it consisted of 36 questions, and was split into 3 sections; namely ‘about the interviewee’, ‘internet lingo’, and ‘fashion’. We tried to make all our interviews face to face but were unable to as many of our interviewees were busy with their studies and co-curricular activities. Hence, we sent the interview questions via Whatsapp to a few of our juniors and asked them to fill out their answers. We managed to conduct 6 interviews with teenagers aged 15-16 years old within our school.

Using the information we collected from our preliminary research and our empirical evidence, we were able to arrive at a conclusion. At the end of this attachment, we submitted a 3000-word report and a poster, and also did a presentation going into further detail about our study.

3 content knowledge/skills learned

1. The importance of defining key terms

On a day to day basis, we do not actively think about the differences between the different social sciences and applied social sciences. We subconsciously lump sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, linguistics and human geography under an umbrella term of ‘social science’. I am guilty of this as well, but through this programme, I am now able to do justice to all the social sciences by identifying the differences. I have learned to embrace and appreciate the similarities and differences between these different social sciences, rather than taking the easier way out and simply lumping them under a common umbrella term. I am also able to appreciate these different social sciences build on each other and are correlated in a special way. This enlightenment was also attained when we were brainstorming about communities. This session brought up things that would never cross our minds on a daily basis as a community. It introduced a new way of thinking out of the box. This was also because this project allowed us to be free in our thinking.

2. Quality over quantity

I was honestly surprised when Dr. Lim told us to conduct fewer interviews. I always thought that more interviews were better as they provided more data, which would allow you to have better analysis and a better end product. However, Dr. Lim told us that there was no point in conducting a lot of interviews if the interviews are not structured properly. Hence, we focused on including more questions so that we are able to get as much data as we can from just a few interviews. This cleared my misconception and made me understand that the number of interviews conducted is not everything, as long as the interviews are meaningful and give us enough information for our study.

3. Note-taking during interviews

Usually, when conducting interviews, I would either record the interviewee (with their consent) or take notes of what they said in point form. However, through this project, I learned that good note-taking during interviews is very important. We should not only take note of their answers fully but also take note of their body language and tone when responding to questions. This is crucial as emotions play a part in an interview response. If the interviewee’s voice suddenly becomes quiet when answering a certain question, we need to understand that they might be uncomfortable answering these types of questions. Therefore, as an interviewer, we need to be more aware of their discomfort and either avoid these types of questions or ask them if it is okay with them to continue asking these types of questions. We should not let it pass as some questions can be sensitive to others, even if they may seem normal to us. Moreover, as I was reading Dr. Lim’s interview guide, I noticed that his questions were very well structured and that he was ready for any response from the interviewee. He was also very polite and respectful in his approach, and his interview guide also included prompts for the interviewer so that the conversation is more natural. We tried to adapt this style of interviewing when crafting our interview guide.

2 interesting aspects of your learning

1. The patience of Sociologists

Sociologists are trained to be extremely patient and persevering. Sociology is not easy, and as a result sociologists face a lot of setbacks. For example, Dr. Lim’s friend’s report for her Ph.D was rejected 5 times. However, she pushed through and edited her report several times before attaining her Ph.D. This type of perseverance and patience is very rare, especially in today’s day and age. This is definitely one of my key takeaways from this attachment, as it is very difficult to practice patience when things get stressful.

2. The freedom in Sociology

This freedom can be seen from the difference in topic between the my group and the other group. While my group focused on Gen Z and trends, the other group focused on creative freedom, a more serious and pressing issue. Moreover, the fact that it allowed me to almost conduct a study on cults, shows us how much freedom sociology presents to us. This definitely made the project so much more interesting, as we were free to investigate on a topic we were passionate about. This made the project not feel like a burden on us, as we enjoyed what we were doing. However, it is not totally free as there are still restrictions put in place to keep us on track.

1 takeaway for life

1. Everything is not what it seems

Throughout the course of this project, we had a lot of “oh, really?” moments. This was because we had not explored this topic in-depth before. This caused us to start off with a narrow mind as the only information we had was our common knowledge. Therefore, as we started to research on this topic, we were enlightened by what we found as most of our research went against what we already knew. This made me learn a lot more over the course of one month. An example of this would be when we were gathering responses for our survey and interview. I expected a few answers, but some answers caught me off guard. This broadened my perspective on what teenagers find trendy these days. As a result, I was even more relieved that I chose this topic for my research. I was happy to learn more and more, as it made this attachment much more entertaining. I also learnt a lot from the other group who did a study on creative freedom among local writers. It opened my eyes to something I never though of in my day-to-day life, which made it a lot more interesting to listen to their presentation.