IRB
After completing your IRB, how is your project both globally and locally significant? What was your process of coming up with a significant study? Why is it important to you?(Be specific with your project)
My project connects to the rising global issue of overconsumption driven by social media. This has become an urgent issue ever since the population of social media and influencer marketing due to the negative environmental impact it carries such as waste and unsustainable consumption. Influencers often promote excessive consumption by using psychological techniques like urgency and social proof, encouraging consumers and followers to buy more than they need. My project aims to address this issue by raising awareness of these techniques. When consumers understand how they are being influenced, they are more likely to make responsible purchasing choices, which can reduce overconsumption globally. Locally, this issue is significant in Taiwan, where platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok are widely used by the younger generation, making them more prone to online trends. Therefore, my project aims to promote mindfulness in consumption especially in this generation by including a section in my study specifically to help change this issue. The sections would include tips for mindful consumption, fixing bad consumption habits, and most importantly, spreading the word. I developed this study by noticing excessive consumption habits across different social media platforms and how influencers promote consumption. Then I connected this to the broader topic of overconsumption and became interested in the psychology behind consumerism and the psychological tricks influencers apply in order to influence consumption. And finally, this project is important to me because I have personally fallen victim to overconsumption and all of my loved ones are exposed to influencer marketing. By understanding the psychology behind it, I can help both myself and others to make more responsible decisions regarding consumption.
How are you ensuring your study is ethical? How did you learn about what makes a study ethical, and how did you apply that to your specific study? Why is maintaining ethics important, and how will it make your study better?(Be specific with your project)
I’m ensuring that my study is ethical by collecting responses from Google forms anonymously, obtaining consent from participants, and ensuring that participation is voluntary. I will also be careful not to collect personal information from participants and to only analyze publicly available content from influencers based in Taiwan on platforms such as Instagram and Tiktok. I learned about what makes a study ethical by doing the online ethics course, which emphasized participant protection, privacy, and minimizing harm. And I will apply that to my study by ensuring that the data collected from participants is securely stored in a password protected laptop. Maintaining ethics is important because it increases in credibility and reliability of my findings, making my study more trustworthy.
Describe how your method aligns with your research question, evaluate how aligned you think it is at this stage, and articulate how you learned about best practices for alignment.
My descriptive analysis is strongly aligned with my research question “How Influencers based in Taiwan use psychological techniques to influence overconsumption.” For instance, content analysis allows me to analyze influencer posts to identify techniques such as social proof, while surveys help me understand how consumers respond to these strategies. Case studies provide deeper insight into major influencer campaigns. I learned about alignment by understanding that the research method must match the purpose of the question, and since my study focuses on describing and analyzing patterns rather than proving causations, a descriptive method would be appropriate.
Literature Review
What are some improvements you could make on this assignment? Specifically, what other kinds of information would you include if you had more time? What might you improve about your process of reviewing the literature? What gaps do you feel you still have in your knowledge?
Although I am pretty pleased with the information presented in this literature review, I still feel like I could add more to this section to make it more complete. First, I would include more information regarding the consumer response in the emotional and psychological trigger section since the consumer reaction matters just as much as the trigger, and the consumer reaction could impact the affectiveness of the trigger. Then I would like to choose sources more relevant to my topic, specifically I would make an effort to look for studies that specify in the psychological techniques behind influencer marketing even when there are fewer studies with that topic. I feel like spending more time on finding good sources would really benefit my literature review as it can make my study more credible, I would have stronger arguements, and I could understand the topic as a whole because of the different viewpoints the studies carry. And finally, I believe I don't have the full knowledge of the psychological techiques and how they coan be presented since I only started to research these techniques 2 weeks ago so my knowledge on this topic is very limited.
How does this assignment consider different perspectives, especially culturally unfamiliar perspectives? (Hint, you may want to look back on your reflection for your annotated bibliography.)
This assignment allowed me to go back to my annotated bibliography to find some sources to use, and I found some great sources with complete different perspectives on my topic. Specifically some papers view influencer marketing as harmful, while other research papers were neutral about influencer marketing. And my paper is mainly based on the psychological techniques an influencer might use to promote consumption, I do not touch on the topic of overconsumerism and I hope to remain a neutral tone when completing my paper. But I do understand why people may view influencer marketing as harmful since many of the influencers on apps like instagram and TikTok often post extravagent hauls and deceiving sponserships. But because this study focuses on the techniques of influencer marketing instead of the negative side, I will not be talking about topics like overconsumption, consumerism, and the negatives of influencer marketing in my paper.
How does this assignment build on previous work you've done in previous years’ English classes? (Please make sure you talk about more than my class if you've had my class before.) Consider how the literature review is similar to previous papers you've written.
Science and Research Writing is quite different from the English classes I used to take at my old school, one is more focused on the academic side like grammar, tests, and vocab, while the other is more focused on practicality and research. This is my first time writing an actual research paper, I was familiar with all the terms but I still lacke understanding of the terms and how they work, like how I thought the gap addressed in the literature review was the gap of the research paper instead of the sources. But with the help of my teachers and peers, I have completed my IRB, methods section, and now my literature review. So this class definitely built onto my understanding in both the English language and some research knowledge.
How has the work you've read for your literature review informed your own project? Think back to your initial ideas for research and how they've shifted. Which studies have been influential on you? Which studies did you think had the most solid methods (even if you weren't able to recreate them)? Which studies might you want to use as a model for good writing, even if your study is different?
My original focus was to make a study based off of the consumer responses of psychological techniques used in influencer marketing, but as I looked through the sources, I found that this topic is quite repetitve, so I shifted my topic slightly to the specific psychological techniques used in influencer marketing. Kaur and Chandra (2025) shaped the way I thought about influencer marketing since this studies views influencer marketing from a different lens compared to most of the studies I found that mainly covered the negative side like oversonsumption, consumerism, and impulse buying. I feel like the method used by Kaur and Chandra (2025) is pretty solid since they used descriptive analysis and statistical data from surveys. And I feel like I would like to follow Hoang & Khoa (2022) writing since the paper is focused more on the psychology side and the writing is pretty simplistic.
Final Paper
How did feedback from your peers or others help you grow during the completion of this assignment?
During peer reviews, my classmate told me that I needed to interpret my data instead of just listing it out, he suggested that I try to interpret the "why" in my data. For example, why was "emotional appeal" the most applied technique out of my 30 reels, and why were "anchoring bias" and "FOMO" absent in all 30 selected reels. This piece of feedback pushed me to look at the data from a different perspective, I began to think about the whys instead. Finally, I came up with interpretations of the data. For example, Taiwan based influencers focus more on an emotional and relatable route of persuasion rather than the direct, scarcity and urgency related route.
How have you grown in your work/study habits in this assignment? How do you plan to grow in this area moving forward?
Time management has always been an issue with me, and no matter how many times I've tried to fix it, I always find myself cramming the whole thing at midnight. But this time it was not the case, although I wasn't that productive throughout the first few work-days, a few work-days before peer review was when I actually began putting in the most effort, I made graphs and wrote data analysis. Thanks to those few days of productivity, I didn't have to rush this assignment much. But nonetheless, I should be productive on all the work-days, not just "some", so I plan to grow in this area by setting personal deadlines for myself since I notice that I work best when there is an urgent deadline.
How does this assignment connect to other work you've done in non-English classes? Particularly PBL?
This assignment can be connected to my PBL class because one of our main objectives this semester in PBL is to write a magazine. Although research papers in magazines don't have that much in common. The research part before writing is quite similar. The amount of research done in this class definitely made the researching portion PBL way easier and efficient. This assignment can also be connected to our geography final project because we spent 2 weeks simply doing research, we used techniques such as SIFT and CRAAP to check the sources which we skimmed over in class. And finally, this project can be connected to our future occupation interview assignment in Chinese class because I collected data in both classes through different data collection methods.
In what ways will this assignment connect to future classes and life after high school?
My current major of choice is business or something related to psychology, and my topic this time focuses on exactly that. I researched consumer psychology and its effect on marketing. This paper acted as a doorway for me to step into that realm of research and further understand the basics. I would like to focus on similar topics in the future as well as incorporate other subjects into business.