I met with three friends today to discuss my project, specifically the interviewing portion of it. I have about four months to gather personal narratives. I am guessing that I will end up interviewing around a dozen men, but with the methodology I am using, grounded theory, I have to let the data and analysis determine the total number.
The meeting went well. I was nervous, felt unprepared. Having never done a research project like this, there is a lot that can overwhelm me. There is so much to think about and plan, let alone actually trying to do any of it.
I am planning on doing semi-structured informal interviews, but don't know quite yet what my main question(s) will be. It seems like using a demographic questionnaire could be very useful in gathering data before the interview, which I could then rely on as a reference during the interview. My original plan, based on the methodology I am using, was to ask just a couple open ended questions and then allow the interview to progress as a conversation. This seemed simple to me until this meeting when it became clearer to me that I need to think about what questions might come up in the "conversation". In the appendix of Claudia Malacrida's book Mourning the Dreams, she lists the questions she asked in her semi-structured interviews. The group of us decided that we would use her interview guide as a jumping off point to determine what questions are important to ask within the scope of this research project. To do this, I will do two pilot interviews next week with two of the men in the group that met this morning. Hopefully these interviews will be able to help me discriminate which questions are more useful right now. (a brief surge of anxiety). So this weekend I will need to prepare the demographic questions and prepare the interview questions based on Malacrida's guide. (yikes, there's another surge).
I try to imagine what I would ask myself as well as what I would want someone to ask me and not ask me. As pointed out at the meeting: do you know what questions you are not planning to ask, and why you are not going to ask them? I still need to go over the discussion notes from my meeting with my advisor, Muriel. More after I have that conversation later this week.
