Learning From the Mess: What Happens in Social Media Elicitation Interviews

Abstract

This article examines what happened during 50 semi-structured interviews that were designed to focus on the visual content of interviewees’ social media feeds. During these encounters, interviewees were invited to talk about content that appeared on their social media apps while showing their phone screens to the interviewer. Rather unexpectedly, the researchers experienced this sharing of screens as “messy” and disruptive to the interview. From that reflection, we argue that this mess was generated by the friction between a distracted disposition toward social media and the conventions of semi-structured interviews—a friction that is itself a form of research evidence.