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How do people use media technologies in everyday life and how do they make sense of them? This is one of the core questions in media and communication studies, gaining even more in relevance in light of the rapidly changing, convergent media environment. Yet, rich and context-sensitive data about media and technology use are difficult to generate when media consumption is increasingly pervasive, ubiquitous, and often goes on in passing. At the same time, the full potential of smartphones in qualitative research has not yet been realized. The mobile instant messaging interview (MIMI) introduced and assessed in this paper is intended to fill this gap by exploiting some of the unique communication and multimedia features offered by mobile instant messaging apps. Drawing on diary techniques and on the tried and tested mobile experience sampling method (MESM), the MIMI uses WhatsApp for an in situ exploration of distinct settings and situations of social action (e.g., media usage). To substantiate the approach, the results of a pilot study conducted with young smartphone users are presented, discussing the advantages and drawbacks of mobile instant messaging interviews in detail, from the researcher’s as well as the participant’s point of view.

In this paper we analyze the link between people's "subjective" expectations of returns to schooling and their decision to invest into schooling. We use data from a household survey on Mexican junior and senior high school graduates that elicits their own and their parents' beliefs about future earnings for different scenarios of highest schooling degree. These data allow us to derive measures of expected idiosyncratic returns to schooling as well as measures of individual risk perceptions of earnings and unemployment risk. Therefore we can analyze for two important school attendance decisions, high school and college, whether parents' or youths' expectations matter and whether expected returns or risk perceptions are important for these two decisions. We find that both youths' and parents' expectations matter in terms of the high school attendance decision, while for the college attendance decision the youths' expectations appear to be the relevant ones. These results suggest that youths play an important role in the intra-family decision process about human capital investments. While often neglected in the literature, risk perceptions are important predictors for high school attendance decisions. College attendance decisions on the other hand depend on expected returns to college. Making use of our data on subjective expectations, we provide evidence on the existence of credit constraints based on the argument that credit constraints would break the link between expected returns (or risk perceptions) and schooling decisions. Our results point towards an important role of credit constraints in college attendance decisions and thus provide one explanation for the large inequalities that can be found in particular in higher education in Mexico.

Differences in college enrollment between poor and rich are striking in Latin America. Explanations such as differences in college preparedness and credit constraints have been advanced. An alternative explanation could be differences in information sets between poor and rich, for example, about career opportunities, translating into different expected returns to college. Poor people might expect low returns and thus decide not to attend or they might face high (unobserved) costs that prevent them from attending despite high expected returns. I use data on people's subjective expectations of returns to address this identification problem. I find that poor individuals require higher expected returns to be induced to attend college than individuals from rich families. Testing predictions of a model of college attendance shows that poor individuals are particularly responsive to changes in direct costs, which is consistent with them being credit constrained. Performing counterfactual policy experiments, I find that a sizeable fraction of poor individuals would change their decision in response to a reduction in direct costs and that these individuals at the margin have expected returns that are as high or higher than the individuals already attending college.