Blog 3

Blog 3

What is the refined research question that you are setting out to answer? (Please be specific in your research topic)

What factors of social media cause people to use and how they get gratifications from using social media?

How does this develop themes and debates explored within the lectures of this module? (Please put down the revised short introduction to your project based on the one in blog 2. Remember that the introduction should include the purpose of your research project, significance and key concept(s) that may be useful for your analysis.)

Nowadays, social media become very common and popular. Social media provide a platform and is a ways for people to connect to the others and offer an opportunity for people to share themselves, the self-presentational and self-realization. People in different countries and places always can share the personal things, photos and selfies, update their status with the others, and tag the geolocation on the social media. In addition, it is one of the online communities and cyber communication. Therefore, people always can discuss and talk about everything such as social expectations with the others. In the research, I would like to further understand the motivations of people for use the social media and the reasons why people would use the social media. I am interested to find out the attitude and intention of people for using the social media and investigate how people build and find the gratifications through using the social media.

What critical methodologies are you going to use? How are you going to produce the evidence you’ll need to answer your research question?

1)     Fifty questionnaires from the entire group of teenagers in Hong Kong -The questionnaire can reflect the selection of people. Therefore, I can count and find out the main motivation why people use the social media.

2)     In-depth interviews with eight friends and schoolmates who are using social media -The interview can help for understanding the feelings, views and opinions of people about the social media deeply.

Now you should have some references in mind. If so, please put down a short reference list at the end of this blog so that you have a better plan of what articles that you are go to read for the project. 

References: 1)     Cheung, C. M.K., Chiu, P. Y., Lee, M. K.O. (2011). Online social networks: Why do students use Facebook? Computers in Human Behavior, 27(4), 1337-1343 2)     Papacharissi, Z., & Mendelson, A. (2011). Toward a new(er) sociability: Uses, gratifications and social capital on Facebook. In S. Papathanassopoulos (Ed.), Media perspectives for the 21st century (pp. 212–230). New York: Routledge.      Papacharissi and Mendelson (2011) used factor analysis to extract nine distinct scales of motives for using Facebook: habitual pass time, relaxing entertainment, expressive information sharing, escapism, cool and new trend, companionship, professional advancement, social interaction and meeting new people. 3)     Smock, A. D., Ellison, N. B., Lampe, C., Wohn, D. Y. (2011). Facebook as a toolkit: A uses and gratification approach to unbundling feature use. Computers in Human Behavior, 27(6), 2322–2329

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Name: Chong Wing Ching, Uni

HKU SPACE Student Number: 10641714