When junior Ava Franzoy was approached by School of Communication Studies Assistant Professor Jessica Frampton about conducting research, she had no idea that saying yes would eventually lead to the resulting paper, “An Investigation of Technology’s Role in Coping with Infidelity,” being published in the Qualitative Research Reports in Communication journal.
“I honestly didn’t even know what I was getting into. It was completely new, and I learned along the way and threw myself into the project,” Franzoy said. “It was definitely interesting, it was fun, and a lot more work than I thought it would be—especially when I went through other people’s research and summarized it. I wasn’t well-versed in communication terminology, and understanding those papers was good for me to learn and understand because I’m a communication studies major.”
Franzoy said Frampton asked her about research after the communication studies major took one of the assistant professor’s courses in spring 2023. Franzoy’s writing for the class had caught Frampton’s eye, and she not only offered to mentor her in conducting research but helped Franzoy apply for the Advanced Undergraduate Research Activity Award. The grant was awarded to her last year, providing Franzoy with a $2,000 stipend and funds to pay research participants.
The duo started with an overarching idea of researching infidelity, which aligns with Frampton’s ongoing scholarship on the “dark side” of relationships. From there, Franzoy said she compiled research around the topic of infidelity and looked at trends within the literature. That led them to settle on learning more about how people use technology to cope with their partner committing infidelity.
Franzoy began contacting administrators of various Reddit forums (subreddits) that were themed around infidelity. She asked if she could post about the research and recruit participants through their subreddit. Once she got permission to post in popular subreddit, she recruited 30 people to interview about their experiences.
“We wanted to do something that people wanted to talk about. People want to get it off their chest and rant, and that was the idea, to get a lot of participants who wanted to talk versus those topics that people don’t want to talk about,” Franzoy said.
Once she completed the interviews, she began analyzing the data to pull out commonalities for the reasons why people would choose to go online to a subreddit and share their stories. The motivations they found were distraction, advice-seeking, and validation, and the paper expounds on each based on the evidence Franzoy gathered.
One of the junior’s favorite aspects of being a College of Communication and Information student is all the opportunities she has been given to explore different hands-on experiences and grow her skill set. She said pursuing this research project gave her a lot more confidence in interviewing people—a handy skill to have as she writes for Ablaze Magazine, a student-led feminist publication that is one of CCI’s Student Media platforms.
“It definitely makes your college experience, I’m so glad I got involved. It gives you purpose and outside-of-classwork experience that will transfer well when applying to jobs and internships. It gives you something to talk about during job interviews and more things to put on your resume. And it gets you connected on campus. I definitely recommend Student Media,” she said.
Adding the research project to her roster of hands-on experiences gave her insight into whether research would be something she would want to pursue in a career after she graduates. She enjoyed researching but she’s also looking forward to learning more about other careers by pursuing additional hands-on opportunities. Since she is minoring in advertising and public relations, Franzoy said she hopes to check out more aspects of those fields through a summer internship.
“I want to get my feet wet a little bit and figure out what I do and don’t like. I really enjoy my advertising classes and social media classes and things like that, but I don’t have any experience yet, but nothing is solidified. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up