Interviews vs Observation

     In Monday's class we talked about interviews. There are several types of interviews, ranging from informal and unstructured to highly structured. An informal and unstructured interview would give a lot of space to the person being interviewed to just talk. There might be a general topic being discussed or some general questions, but mostly the interviewee just gets to spew. A structured interview would have very specific questions, carefully worded and put in a particular order. Within these interviews there are many different methods of probing, or getting more information out of the interviewee. These include the silent probe, the uh-huh probe, rephrasing the question etc. In order for an interview to be really productive or helpful, it is good to have a rapport built up. This was also part of participant observation - you want to "hang out', get to know people, earn their trust or friendship. Then they will be more willing and more helpful in their interviews. Something I found really interesting was the idea of asking what questions to ask....if you are going into a situation about which you know very little, it makes perfect sense that you would ask, "what should I be asking about, what should I be learning about, what is good to know?"....
   
     How does this translate into my project? I'll start with rapport - in order for me to build rapport I plan on just spending a lot of time at the zoo and letting the people who work there get to know me. I want to become familiar to them. Hopefully I will be able to interact enough with the zoo keepers to become friends with some of them. I probably won't be doing any highly structured interviews. I would like to learn about some general things, and then maybe I would come up with more specific questions and do a more formal interview. But for the most part a lot of what I learn will come from observing and just talking. I can see this being a little dangerous, because there will be a lot going on and a lot to process, so I'll want to become proficient at jotting. Finding time for jotting might be hard too, if I am able to do some more hands on stuff. I guess I'll just have to work on memorizing details! That is the benefit of doing a "sit-down, let's talk" interview, it would give me time to write down everything. But I really would like a lot of my learning to be done observing the interaction between animal and zoo keeper. I just found a whole bunch of articles about zoo-keeper animal interactions and relationship, I'm interested to see what the researchers/writers did more - interview or observation.