Interview reflections

In conducting the interview for the recent assignment, I was pleased at how open and frank the student was in answering the questions and providing depth to his answers. It was somewhat surprising because I have conducted student interviews in the past that were like pulling teeth to get meaningful answers. One of the strategies I used with this student that I had not used in past student interviews was to conduct the interview in a neutral setting. In the past, I had conducted interviews in my office with myself on one side of my desk and the student on the other. In class it was mentioned that conducting interviews in a neutral setting was helpful in obtaining better data. Thus, I chose to conduct the interview at an outdoor patio sitting at a picnic table. This was a great setting in regards to neutrality. However, there were a few too many distractions such as people walking bye while talking on their phones and a low-flying airplane that was very loud. If I were to conduct the same interview again, I would have probably either conducted the interview indoors or in an area more secluded from foot traffic.

An important factor mentioned by Creswell (2007) was the importance of choosing interviewees that are not shy or hesitant. My question with this is whether I as the researcher should attempt to decipher which students/individuals are going to be hesitant or shy in an interview type situation, or do I conduct the interviews without filtering and simply discard the ones in which the subject is apprehensive? It seems that the second option is the most appropriate. In a past interview I chose a participant that I thought would be energetic and articulate on the subject. However, during the interview she had very little to say and was very general in her responses. I could not have known that beforehand, so I ended up just disregarding her interview. With the student in this interview, I had no idea that he would provide as much detail on his experiences as he did, so I was just lucky, I guess.

Another change I would have made would be to refine the interview questions through use of a pilot-test. I believe this would have been helpful in collecting better data. There were a few instances where the student had to ask a clarifying question as to what information I was looking for with the question. While I was able to explain what I meant by the question and while he was able to provide an appropriate answer, I think the interview would have been better served had a pilot-test been conducted. The questions made total sense when I asked them to myself, but my biases and assumptions play a large role in how I hear and answer questions. Having someone lend a critical ear to the protocol before I actually use it would have greatly improved the quality of the questions.

The final observation that I noticed in my interviewing skills was that I was often eager to get to the next question. In transcribing the interviews and listening to the playback, I realized that I should have probably gone in to more depth with particular questions or allowed for a few more moments of silence in anticipation that the student would have added more to his answers. While I was pleased with the majority of the information that he provided during the interview, I think that if I had been more patient and less focused on the next question that the data would have been much more meaningful and rich.