RESEARCH & APPLICATION
Inspiration
The biggest inspiration behind this project is the British Author, Storyteller, Podcaster, YouTuber and Former Monk Jay Shetty who creates contents to share his wisdom in the most practical way possible (below is the link to his YouTube channel). https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbV60AGIHKz2xIGvbk0LLvg/featured
His way of speaking and storytelling inspired me to develop my project video in a very friendly and engaging manner so that the viewer would be interested in watching it.
Similar Projects
Below is a video that has been done by Jay Shetty to make people understand how the concept of karma works in real life. This video inspired me to get the idea of collecting real-life karma experience stories from my participants.
Below are four sites that I was inspired by. They are sites with written testimonials of people's real-life karma experiences. Reading through these sites gave me the thought that it would be amazing to get the participants to share their testimonials recorded in their own words because it is something that hasn't been done before.
Books
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This is the first book I read on the concept of karma and this book gave many inspirations to this project. The quote "what goes around, comes around" was taken from this book. The author of this book describes real-life karma incidents in a way that the reader would never forget and that inspired my whole project and gave me a full understanding of my research area.
2. The second book I read was, The Doctrine of Karma: Towards a Sociological Perspective by Shrirama Indradeva and it was suggested by my supervisor, David Waterworth. This book gave me the understanding that karma is a sociological concept and different people would have different opinions about it.
Videos
Social Media Research
Memes
TikTok
TikTok is one of the most famous social media platforms that is used today. I decided to use this platform to find participants for my research. Therefore, I created a video requesting people to share their real-life karma experiences and shared it publicly. However, the attempt was not very successful and I didn't receive any useful responses.
Instagram is one of the famous social media platforms today. Therefore, I decided to use Instagram to find participants for my research. I used the poll research method on Instagram stories to get 'Yes' or 'No' answers for my questions. 192 participants of age between 18 - 30 participated in this research. Most participants of this research were young adults of mixed South Asian and British backgrounds therefore, there's a common thinking pattern among them as they share similar heritages and cultures. Click the below images to view the results of the research.
Facebook is also one of the most famous social media platforms today. Therefore, I expanded my research into Facebook as well. I shared the same Instagram poll stories on Facebook and around 70 - 93 users participated in this research. The participants on Facebook were mostly much more mature adults than the participants on Instagram. However, the participants who agreed to share their real-life karma stories were difficult to get in contact with as they were busy adults. Click the below images to view the results of the research.
After filtering and narrowing down the research results, I was able to find more than 50 participants who agreed to share their experience with me. I privately messaged them all requesting a video of them talking about a real-life karma experience along with the participants' consent forms. Afterwards, I selected 10 participants for my project.