"Can you tell me some more about that...."

     In Friday's class we continued our discussion on interviews. Ashley gave us some ideas for getting more out of interviews. The first was writing things down verbatim - write down exactly what the person says, in the context that they said it. This helps you pick up some vocabulary and be able to put that new word in the correct context. The second thing was language identification - identify how they are speaking, what type of speech they are using. For example, are they using very technical language used to describe a specific field, like physics or car mechanics. Doing these things allows the interviewer to pick out what the vocabulary is and then use that vocabulary in their questions. This helps things get more in-depth.
   
       We had a reading quiz in Friday and one of the questions asked about using descriptive questions and how we did with those in our interview. I feel like I am pretty good at asking broad, grand tour questions. It is harder to pick out little details and ask questions about uber specific things. I am worried that it might be annoying to the interviewee to keep going over something, or asking questions about something that really does not go much deeper. I mean something that is simple and superficial....not bad superficial, just not that complicated, if that makes sense....So that is something that I can definitely work on before going to the field. Also paying enough attention to realize there might be something more to a superficial answer. I have to remember  that I am going to be asking questions about things that might be an every day event, a mundane, boring thing for the interviewee. So it might take a little more digging. This reminds me of the example in the reading, where the author interviewed the cocktail waitress and at the end she said something like "Wow, I didn't even realize all that stuff was going on!"

       We also talked about preparing to conduct interviews. I think that a main reason for reading all these articles is so we can figure out what questions we need to be asking. What research has been done already? Where are the holes? What is the correct vocabulary for "blank" field? But I also need to remember that it is okay to ask what questions to ask.