A Snippet in a Research Assistant’s Semester
Last semester, right near the end when things had gone online due to the global pandemic, I was invited to join a research team that would be focusing on digital wellbeing. While I had never been a part of a research team or project before, I was interested as it was recommended to me by one of my favorite professors. Being new to the whole process, I was unsure as to what exactly this new position would entail, but I decided to give it a try.
With a global pandemic being rather influential in the background when the leads of the research were considering how things would be conducted this fall, I didn’t hear back from them until nearly the end of the summer. It was determined that we would be fully remote while working together, which promised to be interesting.
Once everything was put together on their end, we all met via video calls and decided that we would split into 2 groups. While the other group decided to focus on one’s sense of authentic self across different social media platforms, the other group decided to tackle digital wellbeing and social justice. At first, I was a part of the first group, but then due to schedule conflicts, I moved to the other group.
Within this group, one topic that piqued my interest was the theory of uses and gratifications. From my understanding, this theory concerns the idea that people seek out specific media — or social media for our research purposes — to meet specific needs. After researching this theory, I found it interesting for our research as individuals may have many different reasons for deciding to engage in social justice using social media.
One topic within this theory I found interesting was how gratification can often be split into two main categories: gratifications sought (GS), which are the specific reasons why people use social media, and gratifications obtained (GO), which are additional needs that are being met by this usage. This was interesting to me because it helped me to better understand how social justice can show in social media in various ways. An example of GS using this idea would be if an individual goes onto their social media page with the express desire to simply learn more about a certain social issue while the GO could then be that they then decide to share this information to their own profile, thus being an additional result of their social media usage.
Of course, this is only a snippet of what I have been learning this semester from working within this group, and I am excited to continue this journey into research.
