The task for this week’s class was to form teams and conduct focus group sessions to each other in class. Our class was broken up in to two different groups, one focussed on the theme of the emergence of Memes and/or YouTube viral videos (my previously chosen topic), and the other discussed facebook and its effect on individual’s privacy in the public sphere. I was the moderator for our team so I began by roughly introducing the topic and then posed the questions to the focus group. We also filmed the focus group session, and it can be viewed HERE: (it’s the first one)
Our questions were:
- What was the first viral video you remember seeing?
- What is your reaction when you receive one of these videos?
- When do you typically watch these videos (at work.. at home..)?
- How do you decide who you send them to?
I also showed some clips to ascertain whether or not people had seen them, and what they thought about the videos. Here are a couple of those videos:
Star Wars Kid
Miss Teen USA 2007
Some of my questions were not very well designed, as I felt that I needed to steer people toward the right direction to get answers sometimes. However, there was some good conversation that came about and many new ideas were thrown about. Overall this exercise really made me realised the importance of tailoring questions to get the desired results and information that can be really beneficial to ones research.
(For the week of 7 – 13 September)
