K-Pop Ethnographic Research

Role: Researcher

Duration: 8 weeks

Research: Social Media Analytics

Project Overview:

From June 2020 to July 2020 at Kennesaw State University, I conducted an applied virtual ethnography study with a team of three. The field my team decided to study was K-pop Twitter Stans. Everyone on our team was interested in the K-pop. The team came up with our research design question of 

“How has participating in K-pop culture influenced fans to expand their own ideologies?” 

Our team used research methods of recruitment, fieldwork, interview and observation, analysis, and report writing.

Summary

This process page is for an ethnography class for our final project. I took this class in Summer 2020. My team and I conducted this study and we wanted to learn more about what influences does Korean culture have for listeners. We started by recruiting our interviewees. Next, we started our jotting and field notes in a four-week observation period on the social media app Twitter. We came up with open-ended questions to get interviewees talk about K-pop influences in their life on a social chat room called Discord. Also, we did about thirty-six hours of observation between the team. After, the interviews and observation period we analyzed our findings to compete our study. Lastly, we found out what listeners have learned about Korean culture and how the dynamics are on K-pop Stan Twitter. 

Keywords & Definitions:

  • K-Pop: is an abbreviation for s broad Korea music. This music consists of pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop.

  • Stan: is a term that is used to describe overly obsessed fans in K-pop.

  • K-pop idol(s): is an individual member(s) of a K-pop group.

K-Pop group BlackPink

 Team members

Makayla Thornton

  • I was a team member, note-taker, data analyst and moderator for interview 3. We were all active participate in observation on the social media app Twitter.

  • Jordan Pleasant was the team leader, note-taker, data analyst and the moderator for the first 2 interviews.

  • Cady Hamby was a team member, note-taker, data analyst and moderator for interview 4 & 5.

My Role:

For my role as a team member, I recruited on interviewee and conducted the interview for my interviewee. I did my own observation three out of four weeks we had to complete the study. When we finished the observations, I took a part of the analysis of the data and wrote the final part of the ethnography report.

Observations:

 We conducted our observation virtually on the social media application Twitter. Twitter is a common place that K-pop lovers from all over the world go for recent new on their favorite K-pop idols. For the observation period we were looking for behaviors, interactions, topics, and content that K-pop stans on twitter were tweeting. I had about five different observations sections on Monday’s and Tuesday’s at various times of the day so I can see a variety of tweets. I conducted my observation on my main twitter timeline and each member of the team picked ten K-pop Stan twitter account. In total we had thirty twitter account to observe. Each member of the team used their personal twitter accounts to observe. 

What we looked for:

  1. Profile image

  2. Political views and interests

  3. K-Pop involvement

 Interviews:

We conducted five interviews with one moderator and 2 facilitators. We usually conducted them on Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s at 2:00pm for about an hour. We used a social chat room platform called Discord to conduct the interview via video chat and direct message for follow up questions. I moderated one out five interviews. We used the recording platform called otter to transcribe the audio for each video interview. For 2 of the interviews we conducted via messaging where we sent the questions and the users responded.

Below are the interview questions we used for our interviews...

Interview questions:

  • How did you discover K-pop? 

  • How has the language barrier influenced you? 

  • Has K-pop influenced your aesthetic or fashion style? 

  • Have you gotten any family or friends into K-pop? 

  • What kinds of foods did K-pop inspire you to try? 

  • Have you learned anything about South Korean culture since getting into K-pop? 

  • What are some misunderstand stereotypes surrounding K-pop and stan culture?

  • Define what it means to be a K-pop stan on twitter? 

  • What terms have you learned since you became a fan of K-pop? Any gestures? 

Analysis:

For the analysis portion of the study our team came together to go through our jottings, field notes, and interviews to make an order matrices. We compared notes to find the common behaviors that our interviewee's and participants did. We had common behaviors we created a list of all of them. In our findings we believe K-pop has an influence in people’s lives outside not just the music. We found out that interviewees and participants learn more about Korean culture like food, media, history and created a K-pop community on twitter. On twitter it was a lot of common behaviors that the participants participated in. When listening to K-pop gives listeners a sense of community on the K-pop stan twitter community. We created an order matrices with the categories of culture, identity, stereotypes and beliefs. We took every interviewee and participant data into a table.