This week’s exercise was eye-opening in a couple of ways. First, I have discovered that I am not a good interviewer. I failed to have enough probes in my critical incident interview to keep my subject talking for even the five minutes required for the exercise. The topic was something I am incredibly interested in and could talk about for hours on end, but I did not account for the fact that any subjects I would have might not be as engrossed as I am. This is an excellent lesson to learn. As researchers, we are, of course, generally very involved in the topics we are studying and can be oblivious to other people’s indifference or lukewarm attitude toward the subject.
Second, as the interviewee, I became aware of the difficulty of answering pretty random questions on the fly. Hopefully, I can adjust for my own shortcomings in the area of interviews, because the plan is to have interviews in my dissertation and some other research.