Executive Summary
So the study that my team and I have decide to do was the impact that The Joe Mack Student center has on the students on the Marietta campus and their everyday school life. As an Ethno researcher this is great place to observer the culture of students life with disturbing it too much due to myself being a student. This was a 14 week project that we worked on and during this time we ran into a lot of issues concerning our field of study. We had to change it twice due gatekeeper or the times not lining up. The tools we used for this was Word and Figma to write and sort our thoughts. I going to walk you thought our Research, Obsevationtions , Interview, and Analysis.
Introduction
After hearing everyone pitch ideas and being group into a group where everyone times changes every week. We were hope when starting out but then we ran into the one thing that every researchers fear our gatekeeper want to shadow us while doing our field work. Which is not because it would affect everything. So the first idea was a bust but we weren't to worry because we stilled had time and we could quickly rewrite the questions.Not a big deal. We figure we can study students interacting at the food trucks. To no one surprise the week we went to observe the Food Trucks none came. So we were panicking at this point because we had a journal checkpoint due soon and we had nothing to show for it. So after much talking and panicking. We land on the student center. You might be asking why the student center? Well it because the student center is like a library, but with fast food. So we set out to research about the building and why people come to it, We observe what the student did there, interviews form student that hangout over there and our Analysis and Conclusion to this whole project.
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Method
So what we did to gather information about the location and the people who go there was to go there ourselves and watching them act in this environment that they are familiar with. We make sure to sit far enough way to make it look like we were working or doing other thing while observing them. What we were doing is called appiled ethnography mean we are in the field and part of it without disturbing the status quote of it. This allowed us to witness pattens and behaviors both inside and outside of field to help us answer our question of what dose this space mean to students
Recruitment
So this wasn't this our first choice for the of field of study. We want to do the KSU gym but the gatekeepers want follow us around while doing our field work and wanted access to our finds, interview notes, and other thing related to the study to make sure that we weren't harming the gym reputation in anyway. We didn't want to deal with an outside force affecting how we would do our work. So we didn't follow up with them. Our next choice was the Food trucks because they resign in the public area located on the campus so we didn't to talk to any gatekeepers. The thing was when we went to do our observation but the trucks did not show up for a week and half. So we had to change it again because we didn't have the time to wait for them. So we settle on the student center because it was a semi public area. When we talked to the gatekeeper of this area they it was fine also as we didn't do anything without people consent. 3-4 weeks of this project was spend tying to find the field to study in. Its a big oof on us.
Fieldwork
Observation:
The team total hours in the field is over 20. We all tried to meet up do it together but people had other priority so it didn't line up a lot of the time but we did most together. I think us doing the observations together up us look like we were part of the field and made us inconspicuous to the bypass and other alike. It also helped as better narrow down patterns. For example we were discuss the behavior of student while observing them and was able to point out that they would hang around the area but not interact with anyone. This help tie into our question because to some people this is place they can rest before leaving campus or going to class. The biggest issue that I face when collecting data was that it seem that my notes and jotting were very smiler to each other and there were times that I would wonder if its enough. It didn't help that we were press for time too.
Interviews:
All of our interviews that we did was over Zoom. So we didn't met face-to-face. So I was moderator for all of the Interview we did. So I was responsible for taking note while our facilitator role would switch between Tyler and Natalia because they were able to get these interviews schedule and asked them questions. Our first interviewee wanted to remain anonymous. She use to go to the student center a lot to heat up her food. She said the this was one of the few place that students could hang out on campus that has food. Our second interviewee lives on the Marietta campus so they have a meal. They said that they go and eat their 2-3 time week. They also said that there was not enough food option on this campus like the main one. The final interview that was present for said that they were in their final year of Interactive Design and they have dinning dollars. They said it was easier to stay on campus to than to leave. There was a redress event that they went to in the student center. The other two I was there for so I could only listen to the recordings to help do the Affinity map
The team total hours in the field is over 20. We all tried to meet up do it together but people had other priority so it didn't line up a lot of the time but we did most together. I think us doing the observations together up us look like we were part of the field and made us inconspicuous to the bypass and other alike. It also helped as better narrow down patterns. For example we were discuss the behavior of student while observing them and was able to point out that they would hang around the area but not interact with anyone. This help tie into our question because to some people this is place they can rest before leaving campus or going to class. The biggest issue that I face when collecting data was that it seem that my notes and jotting were very smiler to each other and there were times that I would wonder if its enough. It didn't help that we were press for time too.
Interviews:
All of our interviews that we did was over Zoom. So we didn't met face-to-face. So I was moderator for all of the Interview we did. So I was responsible for taking note while our facilitator role would switch between Tyler and Natalia because they were able to get these interviews schedule and asked them questions. Our first interviewee wanted to remain anonymous. She use to go to the student center a lot to heat up her food. She said the this was one of the few place that students could hang out on campus that has food. Our second interviewee lives on the Marietta campus so they have a meal. They said that they go and eat their 2-3 time week. They also said that there was not enough food option on this campus like the main one. The final interview that was present for said that they were in their final year of Interactive Design and they have dinning dollars. They said it was easier to stay on campus to than to leave. There was a redress event that they went to in the student center. The other two I was there for so I could only listen to the recordings to help do the Affinity map
Analysis
So we broke our data down into 2 tables before we started to analysis. The two table that we did was obversion data and interview data. For the interview data we broke it into section base what we saw in our observation phase base off our question i.e do they eat alone, do they go there with friends, do they work so on and so. By doing this we could better the patterns that we observe before. For example one pattern we saw was that people tend to go to the student alone because they want to work with people interacting with them. Other thing that we saw is that people want more food choices. When diving the interview data we dived them into concepts that we repeatedly saw though our observation and jottings. just find repeating theme thought out our data. For our research question didn't change to much because our initial was to see how important the gym was to the students that go there. All that change was the location but the idea is still there. For our metaphor people are checking out fast food like books at the library. They'll look at and if they don't like it they'll put it back on the shelf.
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Conclusion
This project has really open my eyes to how researching works in the Interactive Design field. I not really use to this type of research of where we have to go into the field instead of just looking up information. This type of work take al lot of time to do and I can see why not everyone is to key on doing something like this. You have to interactive with people which is fine but your work hinge on them and that what scary. We had so much trouble trying to get users interviews. Like no one talk to us which is funny because ties back into why people go to the student center. I kind of wish we just went for the student center at first because we would have had more time to get more note and data. I still can't believe that we got some what kick out of our first field t but I think this experience will help me be prepared for events like these in the future.