I find research interviews very effective but they really depend on how relative the topic is to the person you are interviewing. Of course, you have to make sure the person is credible to answer the questions you propose. As long as that checks out, I find researching from what others have to say is very successful.
I have done a very quick research interview on my high school campus. I had to do a study on how many students were going away to a 4 year university, if they were going to a community college, or unknown. There was nothing that went memorably well, or wrong, since it was so long ago. It was very simply and straight forward. Thinking back, I could have gone more into detail about the topic and asked students what their reasons were behind choosing a 4 year or community. It could have been due to money, scholarships, or family reasons, but is too late to figure it out now.
It seems that we have something in common...very little experience with research interviewing! The problem with research interviews done in high school is that most of the time they are informal and there aren't clear guidelines on how to effectively prepare and conduct a research interview. That's probably why you don't remember much going well or poorly about the interviews. Now that we are in a more organized setting with a class largely dedicated to the proper steps in preparing for a speech and gathering research, our research interviewing skills should improve dramatically. I'm sure we will become much more familiar with the research interview process and when it comes time to to use those skills, it should be a breeze ;)
ReplyDeleteIt seems that we all have had less than a perfect track record of doing research interviews. Then again, I suppose that the whole point of taking a Public Speaking class is so that we can all improve at the research and presentation aspect of speeches and reports. It may be too late to figure out now why your research subjects made the decisions they made in respect to what they were going to do for college, but it's certainly not too late to learn a lesson from that experience. I'm sure that as you learn better research skills in this class your future research interviews will turn out wonderfully.
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