Today, I spent the morning preparing for several of my upcoming interviews, while the afternoon was spent doing my first two interviews: one with Mr. Thomas Cambisios, and one with Ms. Kelsy Grefe.
Because of time, both the limited time on my end as well as my wish to respect the time of my interview subject, it is best to go into the interview with an interview plan. I already have some experience with this: in my Cultural Anthropology class, we had a long-term ethnography project in which students interviewed an individual from a culture different than their own. A major part of this project involved preliminary research on the informant’s culture, as well as an interview plan that lists questions in different areas of culture. For this project on the history of Maumee Valley, those two components from my ethnography project are analogous to background research on the time period and an interview plan that outlines the questions I will ask about the subject’s own experiences and events.
The primary purposes of the interview plan are to ensure that the researcher’s goals are clearly outlined, and also to keep the interview on track. The latter is especially important; it is OK if subjects go off topic, but if the researcher doesn’t leave the interview meeting the goals, then the interview will have been for nothing. The interview plan is supposed to help with this. I also briefly consulted with Mr. Graham, who has experience with oral histories, who gave me the tip that I needed to ask open-ended questions in order to get my interview subjects to tell stories and talk at length about their experiences and memories. This, he said, would make the job of writing in narrative form easier for me.
Consequently, because I had done a good job with my interview plans, my interviews today went very well. The next step will be to write about the overall feel from the interviews, find direct quotes, and begin drafting some of the narrative portions of my project.
Poom- Sounds like things are going well. Please begin to sprinkle what themes/ideas are becoming important/noticeable. How are you maintaining/preserving the interviews? Why did you choose this method over other ones?
ReplyDeleteWhen you say "themes/ideas," are you referring to my areas of focus (on my Introduction and Overview page), or are you referring to my goals and components of my independent study (research, data collection, and narrative writing)?
DeleteAfter thinking about this some more, I decided to do audio recordings of the interviews. This is because I didn't want to spend so much time and energy working and learning how to properly recording the interview when I would instead prefer to spend time working my magic with words to write engaging narratives. The audio recordings work well for me; they use very little memory, and the most important thing is that I can take direct quotes from them, which is very easy to do in an audio recording.