#3. ERASMUS PROJECT: Testing Interviews
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.
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.
The team meet in a lovely café in Plaka to test the interview questions on each other. No need to say, that it was really useful for us. We have 5 major topic, and there are 5 or questions to each topic. We are all Erasmus students, so we used to speak in English, it was not hard for us to translate the questions from our native language.
The main topics are:
1. general information
2. expectation of Erasmus
3. Social media use before the mobility
4. Relationships, ways of living, trends and expectations of Erasmus Students
5. Erasmus : one or various communities ?
6. Money issue
We find it important to get some informations about the interviewee, like the age, sex and nationality. After that we examine the Erasmus program, first of all the expectation, how did they imagine this program, why did they choose Athens/whenever they are. We focus on social media platforms specially, we are curious which platforms do they use, how often, what do they post etc. And of course the changes, what do they use during Erasmus, maybe students post more photos, then at home? How do they contact other people on abroad, which apps do they use. There is also an interesting part, if Erasmus a real mix of nationalities, or people from the same country stuck together and stay together, go out. And our final questions are about finances, and what do students prefer to pay with on abroad.
Testing our questions was really exciting, we get to know each other better and we also put some new questions in, which were in our minds, but forget to write them. Now, we have a better version of interview questions, like a beta 2 version.
