Research Design, Methodology, Influences, and Reflections

This research critically explores the use and influence of self-tracking technologies upon participants’ self-representations within the context of Facebook and Instagram, as well as their influence on users through their offline health practices. It asks the following questions:

1. How do users of self-tracking technologies and social media self-represent their bodies and health?
2. How do these practices and self-representations enable ways of experiencing, understanding, and viewing one’s own body and health in relation to others?
3. Does the sharing of self-tracking data, images of diet, representations of the body, and healthy practices and behaviors lead to healthier lifestyles or healthier bodies?

To answer these questions, the project undertook empirical ethnographic research over a three- to nine-month period with fourteen participants who self-selected through a call for participants on Facebook and Instagram: seven women and seven men, between twenty-six and forty-nine years of age who were regularly (daily/weekly) sharing health and fitness-related content on Facebook and/or Instagram.

These participants ranged from the everyday layperson, those who were dieting or training for marathons, to those dealing with illness or disease. The content shared came in the forms of self-tracking data from applications (for example Nike+ or Strava) and devices (for example, Fitbit or Garmin Watch), gym or fitness selfies, and more general healthy self-representations such as food photography. The research included:

1. Two semistructured interviews (30–45 minutes each), one pre- and one post the reflexive diary period.
2. Bimonthly guided reflexive diary entries (six entries in total) on different days of the week, over a period of three months.
3. Screenshots from content shared on Facebook and/or Instagram on the day the reflexive diary was completed (supplied by the participant in the reflexive diary).
4. Textual and thematic analysis of the language used in verbal interviews and written online data and reflexive diaries, and screenshots of visual content shared (images and photographs).

Although these types and modes of content differ hugely in their qualitative and quantitative capture, socio-technological affordance, and representational states, they all enable participants to engage with the self-representation of their health, bodies, fitness, and consumption practices. The blurring of health and lifestyle through political and cultural shifts in the last four to five decades means that lifestyle choices and behavior (corrections¹) have become ideologically, discursively, and culturally linked, and thus demonstrative of individual health states. Social media and converged digital health and self-tracking technologies enable these representations of healthy lifestyles.

The triangulation of semistructured interviews, reflexive diaries, and screenshots of online content enabled the generation of a wealth and depth of analysis not only for the researcher, but also, critically, for the participants, offering them a unique insight and critical long-term temporal reflection on these practices.

Over the extended engagement of the nine-month research period, the participants’ conceptualizations and practices shifted and changed in line with this self-reflection, which was enabled through participating in the reflexive diary and semistructured interviews.

The methodological influence of undertaking the reflexive diary encouraged additional insights into self-surveying modes through self-tracking practices. Lou used the diary as a monitoring tool, in addition to her self-tracking app and marathon training plans:

It was nice to have that time and space to focus in on what I was doing and have that log, rather than it be just a log of training runs on an app. It gave me that space to think about what that meant in terms of achievements and the confidence behind it. (Lou, Final Interview, 29, F)

Most participants identified both positive and negative impacts of health diarizing, and how these motivated health and fitness behaviors, although they identified more with the positive impacts of health diarizing: how it impacts health and fitness behaviors by motivating healthy behaviours.

I actually found it was motivating to me because I knew I had to write stuff. I know on some of the days I varied it up so there were days when I hadn’t done anything and I wrote about that, I could get to the point where I was like “I haven’t done my diary yet” and “I haven’t been out running, I need to go out running.” It was also like a motivation thing for me and I realised when I stopped doing the diary there wasn’t as much as a pressure to go out and do stuff. It was quite helpful in a way and I found it really interesting to reflect on my motivation for what I was posting and why. (Lara, Final Interview, 28, F)

Fet, for example, identified the process of completing the diary with helping him to gain an additional understanding of his data:

I wanted to do it, specifically for my cycling, moving to a new location and the commute is new so I wanted to see how well I’d do and why not I guess use it as a self-tracking and sharing it whereas before I’d probably just look at it and do nothing with the data. (Fet, Final Interview, 30, M)

Rather than just simply self-tracking and acquiring the data, the participants perceived diarizing as a tool that enabled them to learn more about themselves. Simultaneously, it helped them to understand how they felt about their health, bodies, and lifestyles, as shown by Lara:

I’ve found writing it down made me reflect more and question things a bit more, motivations of what I was doing. … It sparked something in my head from writing it down, as I was reflecting. (Lara, Final Interview, 28, F)

Many of the participants found that completing the diary had productive and therapeutic benefits: it made them more reflective and aware of their health practices and motivations for sharing.² All the participants perceived this to be productive as a means of achieving individual health monitoring in the face of changing personal circumstances. These changes included moving house, relocating to another city/country, traveling, changing jobs, or experiencing mental health issues. Participants identified these shifts as “health journeys,” an engagement enabled through the process of completing the reflexive diaries, which aided an understanding of decisions around health practices and the use of technology during busy and transformative periods in their personal lives. Annie, for instance, described her own personal changes and perspectives on her life, health, and identity as a paradigm shift:

At the end of 2015 when I had another breakdown after trying to be strong after my seizure and having to accept that I had to have brain surgery, I was looking at it in a terrible sad way, fearing for my life and thinking what’s the point of going on, … my paradigm shift is that I’ve just switched everything around and pushed a positive out of it, I looked at it through different eyes. (Annie, Final Interview, 28, F)

Going through a serious health trauma, injury, or surgery for example, motivated Annie to want to help, support, and inspire others, to promote a discourse of overcoming challenging experiences in life and to grow and learn from them:

I’ve just felt like I could feel drowned with this or I could do something for people. I just felt this inner thing that was telling me that I had to use this, it was bigger than me, it wasn’t just me going through a little thing. This was my chance to help and change people’s lives. I don’t know what made me feel like I needed to do that, I still feel like I want to do that, but I just know that I’ve got to be in a good place to get back to that sort of thing. It’s just something I’ve always felt like I need to do, help lift other people up, change their lives. (Annie, Final Interview, 28, F)

Methodological impact is key here. Participants felt diarizing was a therapeutic process with supportive benefits. It also provided what Lou termed a “mental confidence,” which supported their practices:

I think writing it down and reflecting on it helped with the mental confidence behind it because actually if you look back over this time you have got so much better, you have got quicker, you are more invested in this. (Lou, Final Interview 29, F)

The confidence gained from self-reflection whilst diarizing motivated future healthy decisions and contributed to feelings of pride gained from the commitment to writing diary entries as well as the commitment to goals. Participants recognized this desire to be a good monitoring subject, capturing and sharing health and lifestyle on social media. This could be perceived as participants’ loyalty to being continually in line with self-analysis and self-reflexive states. As Wajcman recognizes,³ identifying as a busy, productive, harried, social, and career-driven individual creates a form of status amongst middle-class professionals in contemporary digital capitalism and neoliberal societies. This also may explain the participants’ desires to engage with labor-intense processes of self-tracking and monitoring online, and even diarizing, which participants chose to pursue outside their working hours. Sophie even began keeping a diary after the three-month research period had ended:

After I finished doing your diary, I actually started to keep my own diary … At one point I was writing every day nearly, actually it encouraged me to do that because it was helping me with some of my anxiety and just getting all my thoughts out. I found it quite therapeutic. (Sophie, Final Interview, 31, F)

Sophie and the other participants recognized that one therapeutic impact of writing in the reflexive diary was that it provided a pressure release from the physically embodied burden of constant analysis of your own health and fitness:

I feel like it’s understanding all of the thoughts inside of your head and then I guess when you can make sense of the things that are going on in your head it maybe helps you try and deal with certain issues that you are having. It’s just like a weight off your chest … I think I am quite a reflective person anyway. (Sophie, Final Interview, 31, F)

Sophie and Lara both recognized this pressure as a physical load they were carrying, which was released when writing and reflecting on their health and sharing self-tracking practices. All participants acknowledged that they were reflective people and that writing the diary enabled them to identify these feelings:

Writing it down and reflecting on it more made me realise actually, made me dig deeper into my thoughts and actually that whole process made me realise, especially when I reread over the entries after I had submitted them, I kind of felt like who is this person when I was reading over them, so it definitely helped me more engage. (Sophie, Final Interview, 31, F)

Sophie here recognizes her identity and discusses it in an external way. She identifies and reflects upon herself, her behaviors, and her external sharing. Sophie’s concerns center around how her curated self-representation is received by others on social media, but this anxiety is heightened through writing in the diary and then reading back through her entries. Whilst these methodologies enabled supportive and enlightening self-discoveries, like the self-tracking technologies and comparative and competitive practices enabled on social media, they also triggered the “worried well.”⁴ This took the form of a profound recognition of their health anxieties through the examination of their bodies and health, in the reflexive diaries.

Indeed, when Sophie reflected back upon her diary, she recognized the extent to which earlier reflections had informed subsequent sharing practices and entries. This increases her judgment of both herself and those viewing her posts on social media. As noted in the following quote, obtained from Sophie’s final interview when she reflects back upon her sharing online and simultaneous diary entries:

I felt like, if I didn’t know that person, I would think “oh my god, she’s just totally obsessed with how she looks.” I would probably think “does she love herself?” I feel like maybe that this person is a bit sad really, that that’s taken over, I felt like I sounded very self-indulgent, I don’t know. It was a bit uncomfortable reading for me at some points. (Sophie, Final Interview, 31, F)

Here, Sophie expands upon her anxieties of how she was being perceived by not only her social media community, but by the researcher as well. Consciousness of the researcher’s gaze was mentioned as a concerning factor.⁵ Other participants worried that they did not have enough to say, but as they completed more diary entries, this anxiety eased. Demonstrating the temporal utility of repetitive questions (and prompts) over the three-month period, more entries enabled a greater depth of reflection.

Participants were motivated to perform certain healthy fitness-related behaviors because they knew they had agreed to complete a diary, but also because they felt the diary provided them with a depth of engagement, reflection, and added understanding of their practices and sharing online. As Lara identified:

I thought if I could write underneath what I did the day before exercise wise it would be a motivation to be right you’ve got to write in your own diary tomorrow what you’ve done. (Lara, Final Interview, 28, F)

In contrast, Tim initially did not feel the diary influenced what he posted, but it did help him understand why he shared certain content on social media:

Very interesting … I just posted stuff and didn’t really think about it and obviously going through the diary and your questions it made me think about stuff and it was like “oh yeah” maybe there are these other reasons that make you do things, it was very interesting to me and subconsciously [it] had an effect which I hadn’t really thought about or noticed before until we started doing this …. I don’t think it’s changed how I post or what I post but I definitely think about it a little bit more. (Tim, Final Interview, 34, M)

Although some of the participants were doing this prior to the research period, this pressure to perform certain practices for the purpose of the diary was perceived by some as a negative pressure as well as an encouraging motivational factor. Roy acknowledged it as productive yet time-consuming:

It was something I needed to make time for. So, in general I found reflecting sometimes a bit difficult. (Roy, Final Interview, 26, M)

However, he also felt it assisted him in other aspects of his life, going beyond merely reflecting on his health and social media sharing:

I think it’s just writing the diary, like it’s definitely a skill set you develop. Right now, I’m doing a traineeship and there’s a lot of who am I, what am I going to do. You have to do a lot of reflection, so in terms of that I think it might have been useful. (Roy, Final interview, 26, M)

Completing the diary was a productive process for Roy, providing a practice for completing a similar task as that involved in his professional traineeship. Completing the reflexive diaries made the participants realize their motivations for posting, which they sometimes felt uncomfortable admitting to. Like Sophie, Roy explicitly stated:

There was at some point, I was writing something down and it was like, you really just posted this to show off, and I was like ok, so if I hadn’t reflected on that I don’t think I would have noticed. I was like thinking I wanted to share this with my friends and I was thinking that’s rubbish. (Roy, Final Interview, 26, M)

Using the reflexive diaries as a personal confessional space,⁶ as well as for fulfilling their research commitments, the participants examined in detail their sharing practices and health-related behaviors in a way that unearthed new findings for the researcher and personal revelations for themselves.