Monday, April 15, 2013
In-Class: Interview Prep
Today we are going to be discussing/thinking about the different methods you'll be using in your research. One of those methods is the interview. After completing a round robin with several different members of the class, I want you to do several things: (1) talk about issues that can come up in an interview; (2) talk about how to respond to those issues; (3) discuss what makes you most nervous about an interview--what might you do to help ease those nerves; and (4) generate a list of possible questions for your interviewee (if you have started this already then I want you to discuss the questions you have already created and why you created them the way you did). (5) discuss how the interview can and will enhance your analysis in response to your research question(s). And last, talk about when and how you are going to go about setting up your interview--if you have done this already discuss how you have done this. Shoot for around 200 words.
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I had a hard time saying what my research topic was in one concise sentence. I found it hard to answer the question when it was really direct, apposed to when it was more open ended and less abrupt. I found that slowing asking questions that hited at what my topic was, made it easier to talk about it. If done this way the interviewee ends up telling your the topic anyway in a much better way. So, first ask how they feel about certain things that they can easily answer then slowly move on to the end goal. If you just ask the question you wanted answered at the beginning it is bound to be less helpful and not as interesting of an answer.
ReplyDeleteI chose "where are you from?" "what are you interested in?" for my first two questions to ease my interviewee into the conversation and make it feel less formal, so they can just talk about open up about how they feel about the questions I will be asking later.
After conducting my interview i would expect it will have a high impact on my research question. If it does not lead to me tweaking it it will most definitely lead to improvements.
DeleteDifferent issues that can come up in an interview is that a question may need to be slightly changed in order for the interviewee to be able to give a good response. This can be easily fixed by making the question more specific to that person. Another issue that could potentially come up in an interview is if the interviewee says something that comes off as offensive or against the views of the interviewer it may change the tone of the conversation. This can be avoided by staying objective as an interviewer. What makes me most nervous about an interview is talking to other people and having to look them in the eyes. Some good questions for an interview are; what is the main focus of your paper? What background knowledge did you have coming into this paper? Why did you choose this topic? What biases do you have? And has your view on the subject changed after your research? The interview will be very helpful in my research because it will give me a more in depth view into the people that have good insight on my topic. I plan on creating some somewhat open ended questions and letting the interviewee elaborate as much as they feel the need to.
ReplyDeleteSome issues surrounding interviews are the interviewer’s bias. They can sometimes use a certain intonation that can incline the person being surveyed to respond in a specific way. They may try to please the interviewer and answer with the desired response. People also could feel uncomfortable answering certain questions, which will make it difficult to elicit in depth responses from them.
ReplyDeleteI can respond to these issues by first making the interviewee more comfortable. I can ask them about their interests, which will get the conversation flowing. I can also make sure that I do not ask my questions in a way that asks for a certain response from the interviewee. I can get more in depth answers by asking follow-up questions as the person I am interviewing gets more comfortable with talking about the topic.
What makes me most nervous about an interview is being clear and concise in my questioning. I am worried that I will go off on a tangent and the interviewee will not know how to properly respond to the question. I will ease these nerves by creating specific questions prior to the interview in order to have a basis to go off of. This way, I will get quality information and I will still have the opportunity to ask follow-up questions that I think of as we go along.
Questions:
How much sleep do you get per night?
Why do you stay up that late/ go to sleep early?
Do you think that getting more sleep benefits you academically? Any examples?
Is the benefit of socializing for longer hours worth losing sleep?
Do you believe you are less attentive during class when you get less sleep?
Is your immune system affected when you get less sleep? How?
The interview will enhance my research for the research process because I will have first hand experiences with students getting little sleep. Their testimonies will either confirm or deny what I find in my peer-reviewed sources. They will help in my analysis because I will be able to draw a correlation between sleep and certain negative or positive effects of sleep based on the information they provide me with.
I am going to set up interviews with multiple people on my floor and within my residence hall. I will interview people that have different majors, get different amounts of sleep, and are taking different amounts of credit hours. This way I will be able to get an accurate representation of the college campus as a whole.
I think the major issue with this in class round robin activity was the confusion prior to the actual interviews. The issue I specifically experienced was whether or not we were coming up with interview questions for the person we were going to be interviewing. Once I figured out what was going on I quickly revised my questions and took diligent notes. What makes me most nervous about an interview is sounding unintelligent while conducting the interview. This is solely because when I was in 11th grade I had to interview a woman’s rights activist for my 60’s literature class and I had zero idea what to ask her. I sounded like a moron and the whole process was unprofessional and embarrassing. Something that will help me ease these nerves is not being under prepared for my interview and not picking a random topic off the top of my head for the research paper.
ReplyDeleteThe first questions I would ask would be about the person I’m interviewing and how they got into their position. I’m planning to interview a therapist or whoever professionally prescribes children these pills. The last question of my interview would be approximately what social status, would you say, hires you or asks for your expertise and approximately what percentage of patients do you prescribe attention deficit disorder pills for.
Interviewing this person will give me some perspective on the topic that I did not have prior to this entire paper. It will also help weigh out the bias that I bring to the topic. To set up this interview I am going to utilize Google, find out who the top name is in Denver who diagnoses ADD and ADHD pills and call him or her to set up an interview. If they decline I plan on either emailing them to the point that they have to listen to me or just scroll down until somebody will let me interview them. I might possibly pretend I am somebody trying to get these pills prescribed to me and see how that works too.
During an interview, it is very easy to get off topic. You have to remember to stick to the questions, but not so much that the interview feels robotic. Also, some of the questions that I previously wrote down didn’t work very well for all of the interviews. To deal with these issues we have to know how to think on our feet fairly well. I think the goal is to come in with a set of questions but know that you can skip them if they don’t apply very well. You should let the conversation flow, but as the interviewer, know how to direct the conversation to stay on topic. What makes me most nervous is probably just how much I should write down. I don’t want to be rude and write the whole time, but I also don’t want to miss anything. I want my questions for my interviewee to start casual and then get more in depth because I will be asking him about his life. I will probably start with his childhood and then continue from there asking about how he became the runner/athlete that he is and how that helped him. This interview will give me a real life example and personal story to show how running can actually affect someone’s life. The interviewee is a family friend so I think I will try to set up an interview with him in boulder at the gym that he works at.
ReplyDeleteFor the most part, the interviews during the round robin went pretty good. But, there were sometimes pauses when one of us was finishing writing. I think that in order to eliminate this I could continue to talk or respond to what the interviewee was saying. Also, I want to make my interview seem more conversational. I think it makes the situation much more comfortable for both people involved.
ReplyDeleteFor my interview, I am nervous that the interviewee will think my questions are not very good and that I am un-prepared. In order to help this I can have other people read over my questions to see if they make sense and if they get to the heart of my topic. I can practice interviewing my friends so I get more comfortable talking and asking questions.
Possible Questions for Student Athlete:
• What sport do you play and were you given a scholarship?
• Did you get offers from other schools?
• Do many of your teammates have scholarships?
• How do you think Title IX affects your life as an athlete?
Possible Questions for Athletic Director:
• How has Title IX affected your decision making regarding scholarship money?
• Have you ever had to cut funding from a mens program in order to help a womens team?
• Do mens and womens teams get proportional scholarships?
• What is the hardest part of your job due to Title IX?
• Have you ever had to add a women’s program in order to stay within the boundaries of title IX?
I think both of these interviews will really enhance my research. This is because I can get information that pertains to life at DU and see how Title IX has affected athletes and athletic directors here. I think I will get a strong foundation of the positives and negatives for both men and women.
I plan set up my interview sometime this week. I realize that the athletic director is probably pretty busy so I plan on talking to him early in order to give him enough time to plan and fit me in his schedule. For my interview of the athlete, I plan on asking my friends on the women’s lacrosse team and women’s golf team when the best time to meet would be. I will do these interviews separately and I am hoping to do them sometime next week.
In Round Robin we talked mostly about our personal backgrounds, our research topic, and why or how we chose to research a particular topic. The responses to these questions were all unique and different. Everybody had a different topic and reason for choosing their topic. However it became very repetitive, and personally I was bored of saying the same things over and over again. Interviews make me nervous when I depend on them for securing a certain placement. These include job, internship, and scholarship interviews. Preparation is the best way to calm pre-interview nerves. For example, I think of several questions my interviewer might ask me and prepare my responses accordingly.
ReplyDeleteHere are some possible questions I could ask my interviewee:
1.) Personal background: Name, age, family history, ethnicity, current family status, religious beliefs, etc..
2.) How old were you when you became pregnant?
3.) When in your pregnancy did you decide to have an abortion?
4.) Who or what encouraged you to abort? Who or what discouraged you to abort?
5.) Where did the procedure take place?
6.) What were you thoughts going into the clinic?
7.) How did you feel the day after? The week after? The month after?
8.) How do you feel now?
9.) Would you encourage others to abort?
I know that asking these questions will enhance my research because I will have a personal connection to a post-abortive woman and will not have to rely solely on interviews conducted by others.
There are many problems that can come up in an interview. One problem you can face is running out of questions. It really helps to come in prepared with questions, but sometimes things diverge, and your prepared questions don’t work anymore. This is where improvisation is important. You need to be able to draw questions from the responses you get to keep the conversation going. You also have to be considerate of the time you have allotted for the interview. The time of the interviewee is an important consideration, so you need to be sure you are using that time wisely. I’m not too nervous about doing an interview. Conversations are really easy for me, and I’m sure I could talk to someone about my research topic for a long time. I am worried about getting the right person for the interview, but that’s about it. In terms of how I’m going to go about executing the interview, I will first want at least some semblance of an outline for my paper to start with. I will then generate questions based off of the outline, and do research on whom I should research. The questions themselves might be dependent on whom I’m interviewing, but I have some ideas what the questions might be already. I want to wait for a general outline first, though, so that I can make sure the questions can be fully utilized in my essay.
ReplyDeleteThe biggest issue I faced and know that I will face in future interviews is how to make the conversation flow based off the interviewees responses. Even if I formulate a few questions and plan for the conversation to follow some general path, I know that the interview will inevitably stray from the path of my questions – which is fine for getting to know someone, but I must also stay on track to answer the questions I set out to answer. What makes me most nervous is just that, not knowing how to get the conversation back on track without making it seem too formal and impersonal. I would likely start by asking general questions about themselves, where they are from, what interests them, why they enjoy what they do enjoy, and then I would make the transition into talking about my topic, how marketing of Apple vs PC affects consumer habits. I think that the interview could enhance my research because I may be able to draw parallels between character traits / personal hobbies and consumer habits, as well as how they view the respective companies’ marketing techniques. I plan on interviewing two different groups of individuals – students and professors. For the students, I will ask around the residence halls and in my fraternity to see if anyone is willing to participate in a short interview. For the professor interviews, I plan to first contact my Intro to Business professor from fall quarter for an interview, as he has a background with marketing and technology. Then I would ask if he has any other professors he could refer for an interview.
ReplyDeleteThe main issue in all of my interviews, besides the limited amount of time, was trying to ask questions that inspired the interviewee to give more than just the answer to the question. Allow me to explain. Lets say somebody's research question is the psychological affects of injury on professional athletes. When asking somebody, what are the interests that inspired you to pick your research topic? An ideal answer is something more than just "I like sports". In order to get information that is actually of value, the interviewer somehow needs to get a more in depth answer. This is easier said than done. In my opinion, the easiest way to accomplish this is to set the tone of the interview as conversational. If the person being interviewed views the interview as conversation rather than a Q and A, they are more likely to explain their answers further. Furthermore, they might be inspired to mention something that the interviewer might not have thought to ask. Ultimately the interviewer will get more details, and details help when drawing conclusions. Furthermore, the conversational things that are brought up can inspire more questions that the interviewer may not have thought of asking prior to the interview. It also makes things a lot less awkward. Running out of good questions, or forgetting to ask important questions makes me nervous. Often an interviewer only has one chance to get the information he or she wants, and I don’t want to blow it.
ReplyDeleteAn interview is an effective tool to aid with a specific research topic but sometimes, things go wrong on an interview. The things that could go wrong on an interview include but are not limited to: an uncomfortable interviewee, getting short limited answers that don’t help with a research and confusing the interviewee with the structure of the questions. These problems could be solved by many approaches. If the person is uncomfortable, you could try to get the person you’re interviewing to loosen up, especially by asking him some general questions about himself. If the person is not giving you a long or useful answer, you have to make sure that you have some follow-up questions that are more specific and to the point so that you can get clear answers. You have to make sure that your questions are clear and logical so that you don’t confuse the person you’re interviewing.
ReplyDeleteWhat makes me nervous in an interview is thinking that the person I’m interviewing is not comfortable and that he just wants to be done with the interview as soon as he can and also, another thing that makes me nervous is confusing the person with my questions and failing to solve this problem. Those things could be solved if I come prepared in an interview with clear questions and specific follow up questions and also, some questions that get the person to feel comfortable and loosen up.
The questions that I did in the “round robin” ask about how a person feels in DU compared to his hometown and then what kind of research questions did he come up with and why he chose it. In my interviews, I’ll be interviewing professors across DU with different home countries and try to analyze their answers and the difference of belief according to different countries.
The interview questions would help me understand an aspect of seeing ghosts and paranormal things which is how a person’s background growing up with different folktales and ghost stories may effect the person’s belief even when he’s grown up and logical.
Some of the issues that can arise in interviews are when the interviewer asks an open ended question and the interviewee does not go into depth about his answers. Other problems that can come from interviews include not writing down their responses to questions or not making eye contact while the interview is being conducted. I believe that eye contact while talking is one of the key pieces of a successful interview. Also an interview shouldn’t just be a one sided “question and answer” type of research. It should be more of a conversation between the people involved in the interview.
ReplyDeleteI am not sure how to always respond to these issues during interviews. Obviously if I am in an interview (regardless of the interviewer or interviewee) I make it one of my top priorities to maintain eye contact throughout the duration of the interview. Since the interview shouldn’t just be one sided, I typically have questions for the interviewer when I am done with the interview. This shows that I am not only engaged in our conversation but I have the knowledge to back up what I am saying.
The thing that makes me most nervous for interviews is the fear of stumbling over my words. I usually find it easy to think of my answers to most questions, even weird ones, but I struggled getting those thoughts and ideas out of my mouth. This is where I struggle the most in interviews.
I would choose simple, easy to answer questions to start off my interview such as “where did you grow up?” “what is your day to day job like?” “why did you get into this field of work?” and then I would ask more directly related questions to my research itself. I would ask questions like “are you affiliated with a political party?” “did you grow up around firearms?” etc to see if there is a connection between the backgrounds of the people I interview and their thoughts on gun control/gun violence in the city of Denver.
An interview will enhance my research in a few ways but most importantly it will provide a link between the statistics and “book research” I have found to real life individuals who have their own opinions and bias. I am curious to see how closely related these are.
I have not yet set up any interviews but I will be planning on doing this in the near future. This will be my biggest struggle in my research.
Sorry I wasn't in class today guys, home sick with some sort of bug didn't feel like giving anybody else this! I think one thing that is a potential problem that could come up in an interview is the bias that would come from the interviewer. The interviewer may want the interviewee to respond in a certain way and even unknowingly he could influence the way someone would respond. How to handle this would be to try to be consistent throughout interviews, not to play towards someone if you know they may lean towards a certain response. What makes me most nervous in an interview is the possibility of bad responses.
ReplyDeleteQuestions: I need to think about this more.
The interviews will enhance my research because it will be live opinions versus something written a long time ago and it can bring a freshness to the paper.
I will set my interviews up by asking someone when they're free and what would be a good place on campus to meet. Since I'm talking about Greek life on this campus I feel it's a necessary thing to be somewhere at DU.