#4. ERASMUS PROJECT : Going through the projet one step at the time

The video process

The Panteion Lab « News Consumers Trends » led by Betty Tsakarestou is conceived as a discussion around the recent forms of collaborative consumption, social networks and social medias platforms. The goal is to analyse in a widen perspective the practices of those new mediums by a community group, a startup, an association and so on.

Our team is mainly composed by Erasmus students, who are living right now in Athens, along with another former Greek Erasmus student, including Vivien Lobenwein, Mélanie, Ivan Vorona, Lou and Eleni-Boralda Manelari.

Hence, and according to our own experiences, we focus our research on this question : « How do Erasmus students live — as expatriates — with the social networks and the social media platforms ? »

At first, we raised up the topics we are willing to study for our project. Afterwards, we designed a discussion guide what means : a common document to explain our perspective of research and its caracteristics as well as the process and the questions related to the interviews. Then, we study how to process the interview.

Our project is focused on Erasmus Students in current mobility in the city of Athens. We decided, after a group discussion, to carry out a qualitative research with approximately 10 students from various backgrounds.

The objective is to produce a short trailer (about 2–3 min) to present the different contexts of the Erasmus experience through the prism of the social networks and medias platforms that students are using during their mobility.

We wish to analyze and communicate on those following topics :

How does those platforms have an effect on the social behaviours and ways of living as expatriates ?

What sense of community or collaborative consumption can emerge from those mobile platforms ?

What is the students views and use on those social medias ?

We agreed to make the interviews in the context of Erasmus students such as their home, university, trips, parties as the most representative and logical way. In addition to the trailer, the complete interviews can be viewed on Medium.

In this following article, you can read the common process we have established for the videos interviews.

VIDEO INTERVIEW PROCESS :

Number of interviewed people : usually 2 or 3 maximum
Number of people from our team : 3 people
— One filming with the camera
— One typing the answers of the interviews
— One asking the questions

We defined 3 steps :

STEP ONE
« overall view » : we capture the place in its globality before we interview the students in order to make understandable the all context or situation.
ex : one shot of the university’s building

STEP TWO
« Hand camera » : we film at the same time we walk to reach the students that will be interviewed as an artificial process because the interview will be settled previously with the people who want to be filmed and interviewed.

STEP THREE
« Discussion » : interview of the students gathered in one place, ready to answer the question.

We first ask every student to make a short presentation of him/herself : name, age, nationality, study to present the variety of backgrounds.

Then, we start with the questions related to the topic of the interview as in the discussion guide.