My end goal would be to develop an intervention that could help parents understand how to best help their children (likely kids ages 7 to 14) to use social media responsibly. I was thinking about using systematic grounded theory research, but am unsure of how exactly to go about this as I am a novice when it comes to qualitative research methods. Any input would be appreciated!
Hi Karina, in a grounded theory-led approach you could think about interviewing children (e.g., in a project week at school) to find out what kind of issues they are confronted with when using social media. From all these stories you could extract some categories that seem most important. With these categories in mind, you could dive into (practitioner's) literature on social media literacy and/or reach out to experts in this field to develop strategies for how parents could prevent them in the first place.
For the intervention, you could use the initially told true stories by the children (e.g., think about recording the interviews to have video material), and the literature/experts approach. It feels like a workshop format would be suitable for the intervention with the parents.
Good luck!
In mixed methods research, this would be known as an exploratory sequential design (qual --> QUANT). One popular method for collecting the qualitative data data would be focus groups, both because each group gives you insights into a diversity of opinions, and because you can set up the groups so that each one contains a different category or type of parents.
Andrea Hamm hello Andrea! Thank you for the thoughtful response. I love that idea for an approach, however, my advisor and I are thinking of straying away from directly interviewing children because of all of the extra hoops we would have to go through. But maybe I could interview 18 and 19 year olds and ask them to think retroactively?
David L Morgan interesting idea. So you think focus groups would be better than one-on-one interviews? Also, how would you quantify the qualitative data?
Focus groups are especially useful for developing either surveys or program interventions because the discussions help you understand both the similarities and differences among the participants. Because you are working with groups or people, you can get a picture of the range of diversity among the participants more quickly than when working with a set of individual participants.
As for quantifying the qualitative data, I don't understand why you would want to do that.
Karina Karner Hi Karina! Yes, interviewing young adults seems like a pragmatic decision to realize your research purpose. In this case, it should be added as a limitation that most recent issues might not be covered in this intervention because the identified issues happened several years ago (and new network platforms or functions could have led to new issues more recently).
As an alternative to a focus group, and to extend to a variety of social media issues, it could also be an option to conduct a semi-standardized email survey (if you have access to student mailing lists in your university). Students could just type anonymously what they experienced earlier.
David L Morgan what I mean is, what would the quantitative portion of the research look like/come from? I thought maybe you meant coding the qualitative data and then going from there or something. Also, what you said about the focus groups makes a lot of sense. I will do that! Thank you.
Andrea Hamm yes, great! This is really helpful info, thank you so much!
If you are talking about how to develop the intervention itself, there has not been much actual research on this topic. In practice, the most common approach is to develop a set of themes from the qualitative data, with the goal of generating as much practical advice as possible.
David L Morgan Got it. Makes sense! Do you have any tips for setting up the literature review for this topic?
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