I just finished reading a chapter in one of our textbooks that discussed being an adult researcher of youth who has no personal experience of having this digital lifestyle as a youth.
We were recently assigned a reading where the author was discussing her experience with gathering data in chat rooms, among youth. She was talking specifically about the fact that she was an outsider, not being able to share the experience of being a youth in a chat room since the technology was not available when she was young, and therefore more likely to take note of certain rules of engagement or patterns among the regular users. Her entire chapter in our text was discussing the idea of being viewed as an insider, or when adults make the mistake of assuming they can be an insider with youth groups because they’ve been there earlier on in their own lives. What we learned through this reading and the others assigned that week is that everyone is different, there are so many individual aspects and experiences that make us who we are that we can never just assume to gain insider status. Especially when there is an age gap. Adults researching teens or youth of any age cannot possibly understand what it is to be a young person in their participants’ position because they have not been that age in 2012 (or whatever year it might be at that moment). They cannot know and sympathize with every aspect of a child’s existence, with every experience they’ve been through, and therefore adults doing research have to keep a clear head and be mindful of getting into that “been there done that” or “when I was your age” mindset. But I digress.
The point of this post was to go in another direction. I was an outsider reading this article. I am probably among the age group of the very first of us to grow up with access to computers and the Internet. I remember when my father brought home the computer, the dot matrix printer, and falling asleep to the sounds of the dial-up connection coming through the wall that connected my bedroom to his office. It happened before I was in the fourth grade, but I’m not sure exactly how old I was. I do know that by the time I was in 5th grade I was using the computer to help with my homework. And by the 7th grade I was fully involved in chat rooms through Yahoo. Many days after school, I would head down the basement with my snack and spend a few hours chatting with personal friends from school on AIM while simultaneously chatting with strangers in chat rooms for topics like TV shows and movies. I would make up identities and see if I could fool people. Sometimes my personas would be an escape, a fulfillment of fantasy, or a way for me to safely talk about the things that bothered me most with someone who would never know who I was or where I was coming from. By the time I got to high school, chatting with strangers became boring in comparison to the real-life drama that unfolded through AIM, so I dropped it. Just like most of my friends did. Honestly, I had not given those experiences any thought until my classes this semester when topics like digital privacy and the fears that parents have for their children started surfacing in class discussions or readings.
It was because I had these experiences as a tween that I was able to immediately see errors in this author’s research plans and ideas. To me, it was obvious that individuals in a chat room supposedly revolving around television are not necessarily going to talk about TV shows. Also how easily it is to ignore someone who is asking too many questions or acting in an abnormal way. I also realized that I would not ever trust data that I collected from chat rooms or message boards, unless I knew that I could find that person in real life to verify in some way that what they were saying was truthful. Having been a child in a chat room, I know all too well how easy it is to lie or represent yourself falsely in that environment and how often it is done. For me to ever rely on chat room data for a study, it would have to be on a topic that specifically called for that area of research. Perhaps studying why people lie on the Internet, or something of that matter. But that does not really interest me, so I doubt I’ll ever need to use it. But who knows? If I ever do, I’ll be able to rely on my prior experiences to help me design my study. And I’ll also need to be aware of my own experience and how it is affecting my view of the present, trying to keep my memories at bay so that I can be a more careful observer of my research participants and the data they give me.
Adventures in Bookselling 