Reflection on Interview Assignment

I enjoyed working on my interview assignment, although I found it to be quite the extended process. I chose to interview my colleague, in part because she fit into the population that I wanted to examine for my dissertation, but also because I had helped her a little with her research recently, and so I thought she would be more interested in helping me (reciprocity). I may be asked to help more in the future, but that is fine with me. I need to get better at helping my colleagues with their research if I'm hoping for them to help me with mine.

It turns out that Mary doesn't really like to speculate and expand on a topic. She wanted me to be very specific in the way I asked questions. This was a little frustrating for me because I wanted to drop a word or sentence and get her stream of thought. On one hand, maybe I should have explained that to her at first (if I was even aware of it). On the other hand, I don't know if maybe that isn't a personality thing. I really like learning about personalities, and Myers Briggs personality typing has the iNtuitive versus Sensor category. Sensors are very practical and down to earth. They focus on the here and now and don't spend to much time speculating on abstract ideas or the future. iNtuitives, by contrast, spend a lot of time making abstract connections and creating paradigms as well as speculating on the future. Most people in higher education are on the iNtuitive side of things, but I think Mary tends to think more concretely. I don't really have a way to compensate for that except that maybe I just need to be ready to take a different approach if my interviewee has a different way of thinking about these things.

Anyway, it was an interesting experience.

By the way, I chose not to transcribe my interviews because I come from a linguistic background and I'm very aware of how much "noise" there is in a recording. I had to transcribe all of the small messy details of a five minute recording as a final project in one of my classes. It is a fascinating process, but it also demonstrated to me how bad I am at transcribing. I noticed that Rev does kind of a sloppy job, though. I'm not sure if that reflects their quality or my expectations. Maybe I just try too hard to get it right, and that is why I think I can't transcribe... I don't know.