Student Work

Observations

Dr. Fulkerson's student:

“One theory that I will be testing is the belief that violent music is a way to release anger and stress. I would like to test this theory because I believe it to be completely false and inaccurate. I would like to test this theory in order to prove my hypothesis of violent music encouraging violent behaviors, to be accurate. I came about this theory while we were searching tweets using the Trackr website. I found that a number of individuals believed that listening to violent music actually helped them release anger and frustration. I find this to be untrue because other individuals claimed to get more aggravated and “pumped-up” by listening to this music. Therefore, I believe this would be a good theory to test, whether or not violent music enhances or diminishes anger. “

Dr. Lowe's assignment and student comments:

One 300-level sociology course required students to utilize Trackur in order to explore claims made in Twitter as they inform topics related to their term paper topics. Students were divided into small groups (between two to five members) based on either the substance and/or theoretical orientation of their individual term papers. Students were also required, in constructing their use of Trackur, to address the dimensions of claimsmaking and strategies within their sampled social media. Students were assigned Joel Best’s Social Problems (2013) and James Jasper’s Getting Your Way (2006) as required core readings. This assignment required them to consider how claims and claimsmaking were reflected in their sampled materials and to address what forms of strategic actions were evident in these materials.

One group was focused on questions related to gendered activities including sexual harassment and ideologies of motherhood. As one of the student authors wrote:

“We did a content analysis of statuses and tweets pertaining to sexual harassment in the workplace, identity management, poverty, “bad mothers”, “preggo”, child support, CPS, WIC, and food stamps using Trackur…Using ATLAS.ti, qualitative analysis software, we coded for gender in relation to these issues, men mocking sexual harassment, men being angry about women receiving aid from the government, men being angry about paying child support, and the attitudes of women about all these issues. We went through the Facebook and twitter accounts of many of the individuals that were posting these statuses and tweets in order to find more information, as well as the way these individuals were presenting themselves…”

One of the students in this group describes some of her findings:

“Everyone knows that what is put on social media is seen by many people my question was to what degree they were aware of the creation of an identity through social media. This posed something of an issue due to the fact that very few people are likely to explicitly discuss their construction of an identity because they may not even be fully aware of it themselves; so I took something of a backtracking approach. Rather than search for content containing talk about identity management I searched for tweets and Facebook posts that criticized the supposed misuse of social media and those of that were “misbehaving” or creating the “wrong” sort of identity on the site. Many of the tweets found based on the searches of phrases such as “looking for likes”, “attention seeking”, “looks bad” and “no one cares” and “future employers”. From this there was a wide variety of content collected. However, there was a clear trend that showed that there were online behaviors that were not widely approved of among other social media users. From all of the phrase searches that I conducted I divided the content that I collected into three categories of disapproved behaviors; post that will impact future employment, posts that cause embarrassment, and attention seeking posts. Some example of attention seeking posts. Some example of attention seeking posts would be “single mothers dying to get attention the baby daddy never gave so they come on Social Networks looking for likes, RT’s& followers smh”, “If you post every single one of your problems on a social website you’re strait up an attention seeker.” There was one that I found to be especially telling of these sorts of judged behaviors; “I just want to have a moment of silence to the people who dies and got injured from the Boston marathon Bomb (Not looking for likes just asking for a moment of silence on something tragic that happened today)”.