Hello everyone,
This is my first post here so, before I move on to explain the discussion title, I'd like to shortly introduce myself first: my name is Paulo, I'm a 30-year-old portuguese sociologist who's studying at the University of Padua (Italy).
I'm currently doing research on the cuddle industry, and the reason why I'm writing here is that I'd like to invite the European professional cuddlers from this platform to an interview. Additionally, I'd be particularly happy to interview male professional cuddlers since all the professional cuddlers I've managed to interview so far were women.
Unfortunately, I won't have the opportunity to meet the potential interviewees face-to-face as I would very much like to. Having that said, I'm proposing an audio-video interview through Skype, Zoom or any other VoIP application that you're familiar with.
Most of my interviewees ask me several questions before they accept my proposal. I'm guessing that at least some of those questions will cross your mind while you're reading this thread so I'll just go ahead and answer them for you:
- Are you going to record it? Yes, I'm going to record the audio.
- Will people be able to identify me? No, everything will be anonymized. Everything that we will tell each other, will remain between you and me and will be used in such a way as to preserve your privacy.
- Will there be other people present during the interview? No, the interview will be held in a safe environment in the sole presence of interviewer and interviewee.
- Are you the one conducting the interviews? Yes.
- Why did you choose to do research on the cuddle industry? There's no particular reason really. I casually came across this phenomenon through a short documentary about the famous Japanese 'cuddle cafés'. I thought it was interesting (maybe because I'm curious about Japanese culture in general), looked for literature on it and was surprised to learn that there wasn't any. Hence, why not produce some myself? The Japanese case is a particular one though and, besides believing that it's quite distinct from the Western "version", I also had the cultural and linguistic barriers that would drastically limit the possibility to do research on it. Later on, I found out that these services were also present in some Western countries like Canada and United States. Therefore, for practical reasons, I ended up researching the cuddle industry in the West. Finally, i learned that the cuddle industry was emerging in Europe and, since I'm European, I thought I could focus my research there. This way it will be easier to follow it's development and avoid huge time zone differences.
- How long is the interview? Since my interviews must respect some specific qualitative research criteria, they usually take between 1 hour and half to 2 hours.
- What will the research be looking at exactly? My research will be focused on the social aspects of professional cuddling. I'm adopting a grounded approach, which means that I'll be operating inductively. Roughly speaking, this means that I don't start with a very specific research question or hypothesis. I start by collecting qualitative data and afterwards, while reviewing it, patterns will emerge. These patterns will then be conceptualized and form categories that will serve as the basis for a theory.
Let me know about your availability and If you have any other questions, feel free to ask!
P.S.: I apologize for posting again the same thread but the previous one was mistakenly banned. The situation is now solved!