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 suitable to my research because interviewing has the ability to highlight ‘emotional dimensions’ of social experience, which would normally be very hard to infer from behaviour (Lamont and Swidler, 2014).