s essay intends to give a methodological reflection on the research process and introduce some preliminary topics of interest that emerged from data coding. First, I argue that interviewing is the appropriate method for answering the research question. Second, I justify why sampling for range was an efficient way to choose the research participants. Next, I explain how my insider situation supported the recruitment process, and I briefly introduce my interviewees. Afterwards, I walk the reader through how I constructed the interview guide and reflect on how the interviews went, at which point, I also describe how I improved the quality of my interview questions and interviewing skills throughout the process. Then, I present the upcoming ethical issues in the research. Then I proceed to argue that open-coding permitted me to identify some features of family contacting habits. Finally, I identify some points that are beginning to take shape around generational differences, emotional support and encouragement, situational impacts, the pressure to conform within the family and emotional effects of using video function, as the preliminary findings of the research.

Methodological reflection

I started designing my study with the help of Mason’s (2002) five questions, which supported the clarification of the research’s goals. Firstly, I situated my ontological and epistemological perspectives. While conducting this research, I, as a researcher, imagine the social world as a world of social interactions, in more concrete terms, as a world of communications. I picture my participants as “meaning-generating actors” and not objects. Hence, my epistemological view is that knowledge is situated (Haraway, 1988, p. 592).

Considering the choice of the appropriate research method fitting my research question, I have taken into account several aspects, starting with my ontological view. I envisage the world as social interactions. Interviews are not only capable of capturing social interactions but also uncovering angles of reality that ethnography hardly is because interviewers can reveal facts about or responses on social interactions (Lamont & Swidler, 2014). Besides that, I wanted to uncover similarities and differences in the family contacting habits, for which interviews are more suitable. Lamont and Swidler (2014) argue that interviews permit comparison across people and certain contexts. Moreover, unveiling the emotional dimensions lying behind contacts was also my aim. Therefore, interviewing the students proved to be more suita