The Importance of Learning About Interviews

This week's Knight chapter was incredibly useful for me as it relates to two of my courses! Aside from its obvious relevance to Research Methods, this chapter proved to be extremely valuable for an assignment in my Foundations in LIS course. In short, for that course we are to conduct an interview of a non-library worker and provide a report of our findings. For obvious reasons I was able to pick up some useful tips on face-to-face interviews and learn more about the different methods one can use to conduct various types of interviews (i.e. action interviews). This link between courses provided to me by Knight's chapter has drawn my attention to just how relevant a Research Methods course is to my studies. As a first year student, I am beyond glad that this is one of the first courses I am taking towards my completion of this degree, as I have a feeling it will prove to be tremendously helpful to my other classes. For this reason, I found this to be the most useful of Knight's chapters so far (as I found last week's reading of Knight to be a bit dry and difficult to focus on). I am pleased at how practical and applicable many of his methods in chapter 3 are, and they proved to be quite useful in my assignment for my other class. His example of asking teachers what characteristics are present in a good teacher proved that no single method of interviewing is perfect, as their responses differed depending on how the question was framed (52-53). To me, this indicates that my research might greatly benefit from a mixture of closed and open ended questions, and I have incorporated this into my work for my Foundations in LIS class. Knight's chapter has helped me to really examine how I can use interviews and experiments to further my research project proposal (which is due in two weeks- time flies!). In the simplest terms possible, this chapter has really helped to solidify my understanding of research methods and helped me to really "get" the idea of proper interviews.