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.
