Month: October 2022

I’d say that the planning stage was probably the most boring part to me when it came this whole process. I’m one who is always ready to jump into action and start doing a task. Although the planning stage might be the least fun, I came to see that it was the most important and crucial part to the success of our research and the interviews. Once we had figured out the direction we wanted to take our research (interviews), we were then faced with numerous challenges. We had to figure out what kind of students we wanted to target and why. We also had to figure out why and how these students contributed to our research. A hurdle we faced is the location we chose and how that affected our research. The most challenging thing we realized we had to figure out is our own lack of experience. Before we started with the actual interviews we had a practice interview session when we went around asking some simple questions and I think that helped us the most.

I was a little nervous at the beginning but once I started to interview more people it began to feel more natural. At first for time sake it was short questions followed with short answers, but I realize I wasn’t getting good information to go into our research. I then started to ask more interesting questions that made them think for a few seconds before answering. In the few minutes of my interviews I was able to build a small bond with the people that I interviewed, as well as making a comfortable space for them to speak freely. When it came to choosing who to interview, it was at a random pick because I was looking for how much information did SIUE students have on Climate change. Some other things that I included into my interviews is trying to educate the students on some of the things we are learning within our research group and spreading awareness.

There was a lot to take away from this experience. There was many things that I realized, like many of the people that we approach were willing to be apart of our research and in the video. My preconception was that I would face more rejection and that a lot less people would want to be apart of our videos. I saw many people with different point of views and learned many things. There is definitely a lot I have to work on, like making the conversation flow more smoothly etc.

Before I took to actually interviewing people, I needed to come up with a game plan. I believe that this was the easiest part of the entire interview process. Since the whole class came up with two different topics to discuss, there wasn’t a lot of confusion on what I would be asking people. The topics that we chose dealt with our core theme of CODES, specifically oriented around racial injustice and climate change.

When the interviewing started, we all went outside and into the MUC, which meant that there was heavy foot traffic and a good amount of choices for people to interview. This freedom was daunting at first. I didn’t know who I should approach or even how to approach them. Most of the people I interviewed were fine with what was going on, however, there were a few people who seemed a little shy since there was a camera filming them. Overall, the interviews themselves went well, with just a few hiccups along the way.

After the interviews were over, I reflected on how I thought I did as an interviewer. Since it was my first time doing something like this, there were definitely a few issues that I noticed about the way I was conducting the interviews, with more experience, I’m sure that these issues will fade. My favorite part of the whole experience was seeing people get excited to share their solutions for how to combat these issues, which makes me incredibly optimistic for the future.

I really enjoyed the preparation process for interviews. I thought the process was whole was simple but effective. It was engaging and all voices/opinions were heard that wanted to be heard. Each individual brought up good examples and ideas for how to go about approaching someone and doing the interview itself. For questions to ask, we considered what the interviewee may or may not know and mostly played into what they themself would know and be open to sharing. The motivation behind questions asked seem mostly for us to evaluate the knowledge of those at SIUE considering our research topics.

The field didn’t seem too intimidating. The weather was nice, the campus was calm in certain areas and busy in others. I noticed that many people were off to themselves or with friends, there was an event happening in the Quad but it was more of a solemn one and there was a Career Fair happening in the MUC so there were many adults and students dressed in formal clothing. I feel the interviewing process got better with every person asked and rotating the main responsibilities among the group. The posture of the interviewee was determined by the interviewer: how well they got them to open up, how much energy they brought to the interview and their showed interest in the person they are interviewing (asking them personal/icebreaker questions beforehand). Some people were open to interviews but not open to being recorded which I thought was interesting but understandable.

The overall experience and having the position as the interviewer felt good. Getting out of my comfort zone by talking to people I don’t know and being able to learn somethings about them was quite pleasant. I thought that all the people interviewed all had the same concept of climate change but their exact perceptions all differed.

In the Beginning

During

At first, it was very awkward and hard when trying to approach people, but it got easier and easier with each interview. I noticed that for me, approaching women was much easier than approaching men. It was also easier asking people who were by themselves rather than asking a big group. 

Something I noticed during the interviews is the answers to how to combat against racial injustice. One answer that really stood out to me was by Megan. Megan states “I think we could make classes teaching about different minority’s history.” This answer stood out to me because it is similar to the answer on how to combat racial injustice. 

In my eyes, racism is caused by ignorance of another’s culture and history. This ignorance leaves room for misinformation and stereotyping of racial/ethnic groups. If we are educated on other racial/ethnic group’s culture and history, we could erase our ignorance and then be able to form our own opinion and thoughts around them. Through this would gain an  understanding of why different cultures do the things they do and what they went through and hopefully gain respect for them rather than hate. 

Another answer that was interesting to me was one from Kacianna, a young biracial woman. She talked about her experience in being one of few people of color within her small, predominately white town. In her town, racism was much more present and outspoken. There were many white people who would use the N-word religiously. She also states how she was often racially profiled when she would work at the bank. Customers would accuse her of stealing money from them. 

Kacianna’s situation shows how racists are more outspoken in predominantly white areas. As a person of color who grew up in  predominantly black areas, racism was not much of a problem for me. There were times when I experienced microaggression, but nothing blunt. Now, transitioning into SIUE which is a predominantly white institution, I have experienced and/or heard more stories of microaggression or racism than I ever did in the previous years of my life.

After

The results of the research interviews made my hypothesis correct. Five out of eleven of the people we interviewed were white. The other six were people of color. The five white people answered that they have not experienced racial injustice, while the six people of color said they did or that they experienced microaggression. 

Next time, I would suggest asking more data based questions such as asking for race/ethnicity, age, etc. This could help us better understand the people we are collecting data from. 

In conclusion, this research not only helped give me more data for my hypothesis, but it also helped to open my eyes to more research questions for the future. I think it is also important to note that with this data, it is also up to us to spread awareness of the issues presented and to help find solutions for them as well. 

I feel like prepping for the interviews was relatively easy especially since we watched the videos of people who would go out and interview other people and then talked about each video after and what they did right. To come up with the questions we talked about each topic individually and I think after the first question was asked it was easier because then we could just branch off of that question sometimes or when someone asked one of the questions it was easier to come up with one that could also work. The motivation was that we wanted to talk about the themes of CODES and see how many students knew about it and how many students really didn’t know. 

The weather was really nice that day. One thing I noticed and I think we all noticed was that they had bookbags out on the quad with stories on dealing with mental health and they had booths set up for counseling services. When we were approaching people for interviews I think we tried to keep it to one or two walking up and asking if they would be fine being recorded and answering a couple questions, then if they said yes we would get into more of a position where one person would sit or stand next to whoever was being recorded, one person would start recording, one person would hand them a phone to use for voice recording and then they would just kind of stand there. I think we did execute the interviews the way we imagined. I would notice that each one changed based on if they were alone, if they were in a group, which building they were in and stuff like that. I think some people answered better when they were in a group because they had more people to bounce ideas off of and stuff like that and some people answered better when they were alone because then they didn’t have to worry about what the people around them said. 

 I feel like from what I saw we made an impression about our topic. Ours was climate change, and although most people didn’t know too much I remember hearing a lot of people talk about how they know it’s bad and if we don’t try to get on top of it and do something soon it’s going to be detrimental. 

Before: Process and preparation for the interviews I feel should have taken more time that it did. We did spend a couple of class periods talking about what we as a research group wanted out of the interviews. This gave us the question of “What type of questions should we ask?” We wanted all the questions to have a connection with the YWCA and climate change, we wanted to make sure we were staying in the boundaries of the CODES theme. Then we started gathering questions together. During this process we had to make sure the questions also had a connection with the interviewee and not just for our data. Using questions with personal experiences and their own knowledge was the questions we wanted to put into the interviews. The making of the questions is what I felt needed more time on even though we had enough time to come up with questions. Most of the questions were made outside of class time and texted in the group chat, which is probably another reason I felt there was not a lot of time spent on them is because this was all time outside of class. Overall, the process before the interviews took up time and a lot of thinking but it was nothing stressful.

During: When the day came to interview, we went to the MUC, where most students are just hanging out and eating so they are not in that much of a hurry to get to a class. There was a lot of students, so we were nervous to go up to people at first, and it didn’t help that a handful of students we went up to at first didn’t agree. After a couple of tries we got more students to agree to be in the interviews. Most of the students we interviewed were really into the questions and engaging themselves but there were a couple of students who got nervous to answer a question the wrong way or didn’t have an answer to the question. All data is data, if they didn’t give an answer that is okay, we put it towards our data.  

After: Personally, I loved interviewing students. It shows that everyone has different thoughts that can be used towards one question. It also gets us researchers out of the classroom and out and about. I think we made an impression on the data we were collecting. Our questions were very straightforward, and students understood what we were trying to collect. Most of the answers we collected as a group was not surprising. The group and I figured with the question “Have you ever experiences racial injustice” was going to be a “no but I have seen it happen” from white students and “yes I have” from students of different backgrounds.