I found the interviewing process to be challenging in a number of ways. First, the sheer time commitment of interviews was difficult with a busy schedule. Later on, transcribing was another big task to be tackled. With a thirty-minute long interview, the transcription process takes at least three to four times as long. As a sociology major, I am doing this same process for at least two of my other classes at the current moment, so while it was difficult to conduct a number of interviews and produce transcriptions for each one, it was interesting how the methods in each of the classes lined up for interview collection.
With our interviews for this class, I found it difficult to gain insightful answers from our questions. This is not because my interview subjects didn’t answer our questions adequately. It is more so because I’m personally finding it difficult to research a population that I am a part of myself. As an undergraduate interviewing other undergraduates about living situations, I have encountered difficulty in separating my own thoughts, feelings and opinions from the research and specifically in interviewing. Steering questions to go into the desired direction for our project was easy because our group has a general idea of what the responses will be as members of the population ourselves. This is allowing us to gather the information that we need to validate our previous ideas; However, uncovering insights in this manner is a challenge.
This is something we’ve discussed in sociology as well. In my Qualitative Research class, we’ve talked about boundaries and advantages that arise when a researcher gathers data from a population that they are a part of. On the one hand, prior knowledge about a specific field can help to build a richer base for additional research that is conducted. On the other hand, this knowledge can provide a skewed perspective of the data site. This prevents the researcher from gaining a holistic perspective that results in the most accurate and non-biased research.
Building off of this, I am struggling with a lack of diversity in our interview subjects. Because our sampling method is a convenience sample, our interview subjects are tending to come from similar social backgrounds here at the College. This is despite our group picking interview subjects for our other group members to interview. While this group is providing excellent research, I wish we could have interviewed a wider range of personality types in order to get a more inclusive view of college living.
All in all, the process of conducting these interviews in a business setting has been very interesting for me personally. My group did a great job of conducting in-depth interviews and encouraging respondents to tell stories, rather than answering binary questions. In order to develop consumer wisdom, it’s important to conduct interviews in this manner. Interacting with the respondent on an empathetic level allows the researcher to gain this ‘consumer wisdom’ and provide a product that they need. This is where it’s easier to be a part of the undergraduate population – we all already have some sort of empathy with the subject. I continue to be surprised with the crossover between Consumer Insights and my Sociology classes, and I’m excited to see what comes next with our project.