I just finished my first oral interview with Zach Green, one of the students/PMA members in charge of organizing JazzFest. I’ve been thinking a lot about the articles we’ve read on how to conduct oral interviews and the idea of a “collaborative interview,” so I stuck as close as I could to my questions, but occasionally deviated from my questions when he said something that anticipated a later question or served as a segue to a later question (i.e. I jumped around a little). What’s more, I found myself asking additional questions on the spot to either clarify a response or get more information. I’m not sure how this would work with other projects that require interview questions to be approved by the IRB (multiple follow-up interviews?), but I was glad I had some degree of freedom to go “off book,” so to speak, because this led to more detailed responses and allowed me to explore things that I didn’t know to ask about before this interview.
Though the interview was a lot of fun… I can’t say I’m looking forward to transcribing. But as they say, “them’s the breaks.”
Cathy Kroll
Excellent! Glad to hear the interview went so well! It sounds like you did, indeed, achieve that fluid state of a collaborative interview, that “wandering together with” that Heyl writes about.