Blog 5

1) Progress report - How many interviews did you do so far? And/or how many materials (i.e. media texts) did you research, and how did you research on the texts – textual analysis, genre study, etc.?

I have finished all the interviews already. There are 4 interviewees having different employment status and gender, but all of them are ages in 20-24. I have totally asked around 14 short questions in each interview (7 of them are about the feature of the ways of interviewees in the Korean wave, another 7 are about the trend of them to purchase Korean products.) The findings from interviews had been noted clearly by writing an exhaustive table. A simple rating has been done for separating the extent of interviewees addicted to Korean wave.

A preliminary analysis have worked, an obvious purchasing pattern have shown in two exceeding results from the two male interviewees. Now, I am working with the genre and contents of the Korean shows that the interviewees have watch, to find the ‘frameworks of knowledge’ in decoding of them. After that, the prices of the product that the interviewees have / wanted to purchase would be found for studying the purchasing state of their different economic status.

2) Preliminary findings – What do you discover up till now? (For example, what are the commonalities amongst the texts/interviews?) How do your findings help you answer your research question?  

The first finding is the frequency of females to watch Korean drama is obviously higher then males. From the result of the interviews, girls spending more time to watch Korean dramas (watching around the clock at holidays or watching at every working day) while boys watch them passively (watching only while extremely bored). In addition, girls are always focusing on the latest Korean drama while boys only know some extremely hot drama, such as ‘My Love from the Star’.

Secondly, the extent of touching Korean wave is influence the level of teenagers to purchase Korean product directly. One of the male interviewee loves Korean entertainment show, K-pop music and follow all the news of his idols. He shows his deep love to Korean culture from his way to purchase Korean product, also the desire of him to visit Korea and learning Korean. Another male interviewee knows nothing about K-pop, and he watches Korean dramas and entertainment shows rarely. He shown his lack of interest to Korean products in his speech, ‘My old Samsung smart phone is the only one Korean product I can come up with.’

Student number: 10585624

Student name: Tsang Cheuk Wah, iCa