In this week’s exercise, I asked people about how they balance work and life. During the course of the interviews, several things occurred to me.
First, it is very important to choose a population for whom your topic is relevant and engaging. As we discussed in class, you would not ask a group of non-runners about how they structure their running schedule. I got good responses because I tailored my question to the population. When the research question comes before the population, as it does much of the time, it is important to seek out the appropriate population in order to get meaningful data.
Second, I found that the critical incident question, for me, would be better used as one of many questions rather than a stand-alone. However, there might be instances where this would not be the case. For example, suppose one were to interview eye witnesses to JFK’s assassination. Probes might still be needed to get more detail during the course of the interview, but the initial question would very likely need to be a critical incident type question.
Third, as I also mentioned in class, my experience with I-Corps taught me a number of things about interviewing: it is best to have more than one interviewer if possible, because different people notice different things; it is always a good idea to debrief immediately after an interview, especially one where recording was not possible; the more thorough your notes are, the easier time you will have with the debriefing; and, it is helpful to practice both with familiar and unfamiliar faces before the “real” interviews begin.
Fourth, and perhaps the most important thing that I learned today, is to know thyself. Dawn mentioned not thinking she was a good interviewer (she was!) and Dr. K mentioned that she could only do 1-2 research interviews per day and Tim mentioned that he was not that great with open-ended questioning. These are the kinds of things we need to discover about ourselves in order to make the appropriate adjustments to get optimal results, or to choose a different methodological approach for our research.
Ultimately, conducting interviews today got me excited all over again to start my own dissertation research. Granted, that’s probably a good year away, but I was reminded how much I actually enjoy talking to people and asking questions. It was sort of an affirmation that I’m headed in the right direction.