Hooking Up : Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus, Kathleen Bogle [list of ebook readers .TXT] 📗

The interview solicitations given to both college students and young alumni were deliberately vague. The terms “hooking up” and

“dating” did not appear in the solicitation. Instead, prospective volunteers were asked if they would be willing to be interviewed about “their experiences and observations of campus social life, particularly male/

female interaction on campus.” The alumni were asked the same, but for “their college and post-college years.” I utilized the phrase “male/

female interaction” in lieu of something more precise in hopes that a wider range of “types” would volunteer for the study. For example, I did not want only those who were completely immersed in the hookup culture to volunteer; I also wanted to talk to those who did not hook up or rarely did so. Importantly, I did not assume that students or alumni utilized any particular script to interact with the opposite sex. Instead, I asked them to describe how men and women typically get together and form relationships. Then, I asked them whether their experience was similar or different from what they believed was going on around them.

All potential interviewees were informed that the information they conveyed to me would be kept confidential and anonymous. To ensure privacy, I conducted most interviews in an office on campus or a private library study room.2 Furthermore, interviewees were assured that their real names would not appear on the audiotape or in the transcriptions.

Interviewees were also informed that they could stop the interview at any time or skip a question they did not wish to answer. The Institu-tional Review Boards at both of the universities in the study approved the study design, solicitation form, interview guide, and informed consent form.

I began data collection in November 2001 and continued through May 2006. The interview format was in-depth and semistructured. I au-diorecorded and transcribed all of the interviews, each of which ranged from approximately one to one and a half hours in length. After the first ten interviews, themes began to emerge. I recorded each theme and then used what I learned from these initial interviews to refine the interview guide. Despite using interview guide questions during each interview, the interviews took on a more conversational style. I found that this style allowed interviewees to open up about intimate aspects of M E T H O D O ll O G I C A ll A P P E N D I X

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TABLE 1

Breakdown of Interviewees by Institution and Sex Male

Female

Total

Faith U. undergrads

11

20

31

State U. undergrads

7

13

20

Faith U. alumni

7

6

13

State U. alumni

9

3

12

Total

34

42

76

their lives. I analyzed and coded the data utilizing Straus and Corbin’s grounded theory method.3 In other words, the data analysis is grounded in the experiences and perceptions of the interviewees. Data collection continued until I reached theoretical saturation.

LIMITATIONS

Although I attempted to interview a wide range of students and young alumni, my sample was not diverse in terms of race/ethnicity.4

As I indicated in chapter 1, the lack of diversity partially reflected the campuses I chose to study, but was also by design. Given that previous researchers have found that the script for interaction varies by race, it was virtually impossible for me to fully explore how “minority” men and women initiate sexual and romantic relationships without at least doubling the number of people I interviewed. Although I did interview a couple of African American students as well as a couple of people of Asian descent, several other racial/ethnic groups are left out entirely, such as Hispanics, Indians, and Native Americans. It seems likely that the intimate behavior of these groups vary not only from the dominant white culture, but also from one another. This makes studying them an even greater challenge, yet it is a challenge that I hope researchers will undertake soon.

In addition to the lack of racial diversity, interviewing students and alumni from two primarily residential four-year colleges inevitably reduces the social class diversity. Most of the students on the campuses I studied were middle or upper-middle class. This raises questions about how men and women interact and form relationships if they attend a commuter college or if they do not attend college at all. I suspect that 190

M E T H O D O ll O G I C A ll A P P E N D I X

hooking up still goes on, but to a much lesser degree (similar to what I found among alumni once they leave the college environment). However, this is only speculation and empirical research is needed to examine this issue. My study was also limited to universities on the East Coast of the United States. Although some national data on hooking up has been gathered, more is needed to see if there are regional variations in how the hookup script operates on campus.

I chose a qualitative methodology for this project because I believed it was the best way to capture what is really happening in the intimate lives of college students and young alumni. Hopefully, the richness of the data I collected came through in the many interview excerpts provided throughout the preceding chapters. Although my data were able to show what hooking up is, the range of experiences it encapsulates, and so on, my data cannot tell us how many students are engaging in various activities along the spectrum of hooking up. Therefore, more representative quantitative studies are needed to determine how often students are engaging in various behaviors within the hookup script.

Finally, hooking up was the dominant script for forming sexual and romantic relationships on the campuses I studied, but not “everyone” was doing it. As I indicated in chapter 4, there were many groups or individuals who did not engage in the hookup culture. Although I attempted to have their voices heard, I realize that their stories were not completely captured. Future research should consider how students who abstain from hooking up navigate their sexual and romantic lives as well as how they are affected by the dominant hookup culture that surrounds them.

Notes

NOTES TO CHAPTER 1

1. Wolfe 2000, book jacket.

2. Bailey 1988.

3. See