Students needed to participate in research on Instant Messaging

By Pat Steed
Staff Writer

Instant Messaging will soon attain a level of significance here at Georgia College & State University.
Fourteen senior Mass Communication students are beginning a research project to study the uses and gratifications of the Instant Messaging system.
The Senior Seminar class is a class designed for seniors as a way to wrap up everything that has been learned in their tenure in the Mass Communication program. Along with interviews, resumes, portfolios and service learning projects, the class is performing the Instant Messaging research project in conjunction with a similar class at Elon College in North Carolina.
“Instant Messaging is a relatively new technology, and we are trying to figure out what effects it is having in our schools, who is using it and for what purposes,” said Katherine Chandler, one of the seniors in the class.
Part of this research project will be the review of a large sample of Instant Messaging sessions. The students are going to find random college students and have them record their Instant Messaging sessions for an entire day.
“The purpose of looking at people’s chat sessions is to see what students are actually talking about. If they simply told us what they were talking about, it wouldn’t be accurate enough and would affect our research,” said Laura Fountain, who is a senior Mass Communication major with an emphasis in Advertising.
The research team is looking for GC&SU students to get involved with the research. One of their goals is to have the maximum amount of participation possible from our students.
“We are looking for at least 100 student samples for our research. We are hoping to have plenty to choose from so that we have a lot of material to work with, and so that we can give the best information possible. The better our sample number, the more we can learn about Instant Messaging and where it is going in the future,” said Chandler.
Any research participant would have to take a disk and save any and all Instant Messaging sessions that they participated in throughout a given 24-hour period. Then the research team would take all of the sessions and look at them to determine findings and results.
All personal information, including names, will be held strictly confidential. Participants will be able to sign a contract so that all information will be held in confidence.
Any student at GC&SU who would like to participate in the research please email Dr. Mary Jean Land at mland@gcsu.edu, and should include their name and phone number so they may be contacted.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Mar 8 2002. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry