About interviews...

I know there are many of us who are in INF1300. For those of you who aren't, one of our assignments involves conducting an interview on the public's view of the library by interviewing a non-library worker. Within the past week I have conducted the interview and have found that this class has really assisted me in determining the method I would employ as an interviewer/researcher. The goal in this particular research is to discover what a person knows about libraries, how the operate, etc. At first I thought that it would be very lightly structured but through talking with many people in the class, there was a general consensus that many of the people interviewed did not know a whole lot about libraries. This made it difficult as an interviewer because despite the openended questions, it became apparent that there needed to be more structure than I had originally thought. The questions that I thought would have long answers were very short and I had to compensate by asking questions in different ways or being more specific without telling them what they know about the library. Of course, discovering that there is a lack of knowledge about the library gives a researcher valid information which can lead to questions of why there is such a lack of knowledge on the resources offered by the library, for example. That being said, I wanted to cover all of the bases and try my best to engage my interviewee with the questions I was asking to solicit answers that were more elaborate than a simple 'I don't know'. This would have made for a very short interview.