Interviews

From late 2006 to mid-2007, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 94 teens from 10 states (Alabama, California, Iowa, Kansas, Massachusetts, Michigan,

Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Washington).⁴ Roughly half came from major urban regions and their surrounding suburbs (e.g., Los Angeles, Seattle), a quarter came from suburbs of mid-size cities (e.g., outside Austin, Texas, and Kansas City, Missouri), and a quarter came from smaller towns or the rural regions surrounding them (e.g., Ames, Iowa, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania). I intentionally chose diverse regions and made an effort in these regions to go to diverse communities that represented different demographics and cultural makeup.

Recruitment varied in each region. In Seattle, the library association that invited me to speak used its connections to recruit a diverse sample of teens who lived within a 50-mile radius. In Kansas, I leveraged a network of teachers through a friend who worked for the state’s department of education. In Los Angeles, I worked with a youth center organizer, a teacher, and a few parents. In Texas, my second cousin connected me to a local parents’ organization. In Iowa and Nebraska, I leveraged the networks of friends who grew up there and friends of friends to reach people who lived there. Extended networks of friends, parents, and teachers helped me reach teens in Alabama, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. In Seattle, Kansas, Massachusetts, Iowa, and half of Los Angeles, people who knew the

community helped me recruit teens from different backgrounds. I asked these adults to introduce me to a representative range of teens who reflected the diversity of the community; I explicitly asked them to avoid focusing on exceptional teens—both

4 Details about teens I interviewed or from whom I quoted public online content can be found in Appendix 1.

those who stood out for their achievements and those who stood out for their disobedience or failures. In doing so, I wanted to curb the tendency to emphasize extreme cases so that I could obtain a sample that included average teens. I did meet and interview exceptional teens, but they were not dominant in my sample. In other locations, I asked the networks of adults whom I spoke with to encourage teens and/or parents to contact me if they wanted to participate. I requested simple demographic information (age, gender, zip code, interests) and selected a

combination of teens who I thought might show differences within a community.

When I took this route, more than twice as many teens contacted me as I had time to interview. At no point did I limit my interviewees based on their technical abilities or investments.

The formal in-person interviews were semi-structured and lasted 1–4 hours, with the majority lasting between 90 minutes and 2 hours. I allowed the teens to choose where they wished to be interviewed; I interviewed teens at their houses (with parents in a different room), at schools, at coffee shops and restaurants, at youth centers, and at their places of employment. I invited teens to bring along a friend or family member of their choice if that would make them feel comfortable; roughly half of those interviewed were interviewed in pairs. In earlier projects, I had found that this sometimes helps ease the power dynamics inherent in interviews, especially when there is a discrepancy in age. I had also found that allowing pairs makes parents more comfortable, which can help with gaining access to teens. Not

surprisingly, interviews with pairs tend to take longer. No doubt interviewing pairs

alters the dynamic, but the differences are neither better nor worse. Pairs tend to correct one another or provide clarity or context to the other’s answers, leading me to believe that singles are more likely to obscure or misremember the truth. When the rapport between all three of us is good, pairs are more likely to reveal

embarrassing events about the other person or to push the other person to do so.

Conversely, singles are more likely to indicate lack of knowledge or weaknesses. It is easier to get at—and for that matter observe—friendship dynamics in pairs while teens offer a more detailed portrait of home life when alone.

Of the teens I interviewed, 57 percent were female and 43 percent were male.

The average age of the teens I interviewed was 15.9 years old. I asked teens to indicate their race and allowed them to indicate multiple races—51 percent listed white; 20 indicated they were Hispanic, Latino, Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Chicano;

15 percent marked themselves as black; 6 percent said that they had some Native American roots; 4 percent identified as Indian or Pakistani; 4 percent indicated they were Asian; and 2 percent identified as Egyptian. I did not ask for information on religious practices, but the majority of teens I interviewed referenced church during the interview; two volunteered that their families were Muslim. More than 25 percent indicated that they spoke a non-English language at home either sometimes or frequently.

While marking socioeconomic status in the United States is fraught, I attempted to interview teens who appeared to be from a wide variety of socio-economic

backgrounds. I asked teens to indicate their parents’ education, although many did not. Of those who did, approximately two-thirds indicated that they had at least one parent with a college education. I interviewed teens whose parents were lawyers and veterinarians and I interviewed teens whose parents worked the night shift at a hotel and worked at the family restaurant. Some of the teens I interviewed did not have a parent who worked and three did not live with either parent. Some teens had parents who expected them to do graduate work while others simply wanted them to stay off drugs. Not all of the teens I interviewed expected to go to college and few intended to leave their home state to do so. A handful expected to go to the military and the rest intended to work after high school. In finding teens to interview, I tried to find teens with different stories and different perspectives.

The bulk of my dissertation analysis stems from the data that I collected during interviews, set against online observations and observations of the communities in which these teens live. My analysis of peer relations and power dynamics is deeply rooted in these interviews and I use teens’ words to give shape to the analysis that I do. These interviews are also what helped me map teens’ online performances.