I've found that I haven't made a lot of changes to my research question over the course of the semester. I think a lot of that is because this is a topic I've been thinking about researching for a couple of years. As I discussed in a previous post, I spent a lot of time at the beginning of the course thinking about how to make the topic more practical and adapting my research question to suit what I've learned at the iSchool.
However, my topic is a relatively exploratory one, and my research question is a little broad. My methodology, unstructured interviews, allows for some adaption during the course of the study to suit whatever I encounter at the time. So, perhaps, in the end I've left myself room to make last minute changes. As a fairly indecisive person I do have a tendency to try to keep my options open as long as possible, and I think it's interesting to consider how that aspect of my personality might have influenced the design of my research plan. Now that you've reflected back on the way your research developed, have any of you noticed a similar trend?
I'm interested in your approach to unstructured interviews. I'm also using interviews as part of my methodology, and I found that one of the most difficult parts of the proposal to write was the part in which I described how I intended to carry out the interviews. How did you end up framing your interview process in the proposal? Are you planning to ask open-ended questions or will you just encourage the interviewee to speak at length without any prompting? It sounds like a great project, good luck!
ReplyDeleteI found a really helpful book on long interviews (McCracken, 1988) that outlined a useful methodology very clearly and helped with a lot of my planned structure, and it had some suggestions for preparation before the interview and how to prompt without leading the interviewee. I just noticed that I described the interviews as unstructured in my post but it should definitely say semi-structured, since there's a questionnaire component that acts as prompts through the interview. Thanks for the feedback Lauren!
ReplyDeleteWhen I read your post, I immediately started trying to figure out how my personality pushed its way into my research proposal. Although it isn't really my personality but rather my learning style, I realized that I decided to leave my interview recordings as audio-recordings for the analysis stage, in part, because I am an auditory learner. A main reason was because of all the issues that transcription entails but being an auditory learner may have been the deciding factor.
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