Discussion

Our study was designed to seek answers to two hypotheses that we created for our group project. Our results surprisingly coincided very well with what we had predicted and hypothesized prior to our survey. Our first hypothesis stated, "DePaul students are more likely to interact with friends and family on Instagram rather than unfamiliar people." This hypothesis was proven to be true, from our survey results, we saw that a wide majority of respondents answered that they followed Instagram accounts that were mostly their friends and family. Over 60% of surveyors responded that their majority of people they followed were their friends and family members, as opposed to celebrities, athletes, and companies/brands. The second hypothesis we formed was, "DePaul students are more likely to use Instagram to enhance pictures than use any other digital photo enhancement app (i.e. Photoshop)." Throughout our study we focused on the popularity of the photo-editing app, Instagram. After compiling our results, we found that this hypothesis was also true, especially after looking at the statistics from our survey questions. Over half of our respondents, 52% of them said that they would use Instagram to edit their photos over other programs such as, Photoshop, PicStitch, and PicMonkey. In addition, when we asked if people had an Instagram account, an impressive 72% responded that they did in fact have an Instagram account, showing its popularity with editing photos.

Some further results that we found from our study gave us more insight as to why Instagram is the number one photo-editing app on the market. After asking what type of device people used to take photographs, an astounding 86% of respondents replied that they used cellphone cameras to take photos. This led us to understand that Instagram's popularity and synonymy with photo editing. If people are using their cellphone cameras to take the majority of their photographs, a mobile app, such as Instagram, would be the ideal way to edit their pictures. A related question about the respondent's preferred method of editing, asked what piece of technology they mostly used when editing photographs. The results showed that 58% of people used their cellphones to edit or enhance their pictures, proving our theory that the mobility of cellphone cameras increases the popularity and usage of the Instagram app.