Reflections on the Interview Exercise

For the interview exercise last week, I found it extremely difficult to craft interview questions to ask my partner. In hind sight, I may have misunderstood they sort of question we were supposed to ask. When I tried to think of question to ask my partner about her research project I kept drawing a blank. It occurs to me now that if I re-framed the task to interview about the process of selecting a research topic, I might have had more success. This highlights for me the need for interview prep. As they say in trial law, never ask a question you don’t know the answer too. As was discussed in class, in order to give enough structure to make the interview useful as part of a larger data set, you need to have more or less the same interview with everyone, and the interview needs to be meaningful. Ideally, I would pre-interview everyone in a free flowing format before doing the structured data collecting interview. I can, however, foresee issues with subject availability to do this sort of interview. Also, it was mentioned in class that there is an expectation that you analyse all the information you collect (e.g. video vs. audio recording of interviews) how does this apply to prep work? Do can you ignore pre-interviews in your analysis, or do you have to find a way to include them?