Blog #8 Research Plan (Retroactive)

My goal for this research project was to find a pattern in texting behavior in those who use text messaging to communicate.   I wanted to find if 'texters' changed their style in texting depending on their audience (as vague as that sounds).

I did not develop a focused set of questions until after I interviewed my first participant.  I wanted to ask at least four people. In fact, when I first started, I didn't even have a real list of questions. I only asked very simple questions about how often they texted, and if they changed their writing depending on their audience. 

The questions I wanted to ask are how frequent "texters" send and receive text messages.  I asked my participants questions about how many texts they received daily and weekly on average.  I also asked my participants to describe their style of texting; namely,  if they preferred short messages (usually no more than one sentence), versus longer messages about a paragraph long.

The first sources I used for this research project was th the article "The socio-demographics of texting: An Analysis of Traffic Data" written by Rich Ling, Sundsoy and Bertel.   I thought this article would be useful, since it showed a very detailed statistical analysis on the behaviors of texters (it actually showed that texters prefer to text within their own age group, and prefer to text within a small group of friends and family).   However, it was almost completely irrelevant by the time I developed
a new set of questions.   So I had to look for another source, and kept coming across dead ends, because all of those I ended up interviewing were in their 20's, while most of the articles I ended up coming across were studying teenagers, and had a focus completely irrelevant to the questions I wanted to ask.

But I did manage to find a research paper somewhat relevant to my focus.  It was called "It's the American Lifestyle: An Investigation of Text Messaging by College Students" by Lynne Kelly et al, since all I had interviewed at that point were college students in their 20's.  Unlike the Rich Lin et al. paper, that paper analyzed the behaviors of texters relevant to my paper (frequency of texts, message length, audience consideration, etc.).  So I ended up choosing that one.