Looking back on the entire interview process, it went mostly as I expected. Having interviewed people while I was the writing intern for W&M News, I knew I would be comfortable with conducting them. I love getting to talk with people and finding out more about what makes each person unique. However, one thing I realized after I did my practice interview with a friend was that I had to change my approach to the interviews in a very subtle way.
As a writer, I’ve been used to approaching interviews with the sole intent to find out everything I possibly can about who they are and what they’re passionate about or do. Afterwards, I can then sit down and turn their interview into a story to share with anyone who reads it. However, after I did the first interview and seen the types of answers I got, as well as the additional questions I asked in the moment, I noticed that I was still entering into the interview with a journalist mindset. It didn’t take me long to realize that I needed to approach the interviews while keeping in mind that I was conducting research for the purpose of analyzing data to be used for a larger project, not just to tell someone’s story.
After continuously working to alter my approach with each additional interview, the differences I saw between the practice one, my second interview, and my third interview were amazing. The last interview had such great insights from the girl I talked with, because I was able to pick up on things she briefly mentioned while answering other questions and could then ask follow-up questions to learn about that specific behavior or habit.
In short, I learned that journalistic interviewing is learning about a person, and interviewing for research is learning about the person’s behavior. While those distinctions may seem minuscule on the surface and something I’d never really thought about before, they made a huge difference during the interview, which definitely showed in the data.