Xianfeng Mou 2009 Fall 10600-394
Interview Report Assignment: Discovering New Developments in Your Culture
Purpose
This project requires you to report back what new developments, understanding, or expertise that you have gained from the expert on your topic.
Since you have experienced the process of doing archival research with the Literature Review, you will be introduced to techniques of interviewing, which is one kind of field research, in this assignment. Such techniques include doing preliminary research about your potential experts, communicating with the experts, designing and ordering your interview questions, conducting your interview, and finally writing your report. In short, you will conduct an interview with an expert on the topic you selected and then write a report on your findings. Your report should be at least 3.5 pages long for the body of your text. Please do not exceed five pages.
Choosing the Expert
Depending on your topic, the expert can be a teacher, a university administrator, or a researcher who has done extensive study on your subject. Your expert can be anyone who knows a great deal and can speak with authority about your topic. But do not use your everyday friend unless he or she is widely considered an expert in your field. Following are some examples of experts whom other students have interviewed.
Prepare two experts in case one may suddenly change their plan or become unavailable.
Topic (Expert)
Financial aid for international students (The university’s director of student financial aid)
Iranian/U.S. criminal justice (A professor of criminology systems)
Puerto Rican independence (A newspaper journalist in Puerto Rico (by phone))
Benefits of joining the co-op program (Director of Purdue’s Co-op Office)
Famine in Ethiopia (A professor in the Agricultural Department who has studied it deeply)
Preparing for the Interview
Interviews are generally considered formal or semi-formal. But of course your interview will not be as formal as a CNN interview. If you are interviewing, for example, a university official or a professor, you need to carefully prepare for the interview, guided by the following guidelines:
- Ask for their participation and agreement. You can either knock on their office doors or write a formal email. Write your email as if it is a formal letter. Use your subject heading; explain briefly your purpose; how much time you expect the interview to last; and possible interview date. Remember the email etiquette.
- Make sure they have time to talk to you. This means contacting people ahead of time and making appointment for times when they will be free to talk to you for about half an hour if you are extremely well prepared (Often the interview may last for an hour). This is particularly important if you intend to interview someone when they are at work (for example, professors or administrators).
- Explain what you are doing and why you are doing it.
- Be well prepared yourself. You need to know your expert’s specialty. And you need to know what information you want to get out of the interview. Have your questions ready.
- Some people may prefer to know the questions beforehand. If yes, send your questions to him/her as an attached file.
- The Digital Learning Collaboratory in the Undergrad Library has digital recorders and camcorders you can borrow with your student ID. Ask around if they have changed their location. If you have your own, that is much better.
- It is highly recommended that you record the interview to preserve the flavor and to practice the quoting techniques to be introduced. Students who relied on note-taking generally did not produce good interview reports.
- The format of your interview can vary. You can use face-to-face, phone, email, or video-conferencing, whatever suits both your expert and you.
Conducting the Interview
- Be courteous and on time.
- Stay on track. If a digression goes too far, politely guides the conversation back to your topic. But also be prepared to seize and develop new directions that you have not thought about before.
- Record the interview. Remember to ask their permission first.
- Remember to thank them immediately with an email afterwards.
Writing the Interview Report
After the interview:
- Write notes for yourself on everything you remember about the place where the interview took place, any body language your expert used, and your own impressions of the interview.
- Review your notes or listen to your recording several times, making notes on important comments your expert makes.
- Decide what the Main Idea is that you want your report to get across to your reader.
- Select the information you find most interesting or useful for your purposes. You do not need to report everything the expert said because the idea is not to create a portrait of the expert but to report on new information he or she has told you about your topic.
- Also select details about the setting and the expert’s body language that you think will make your report lively.
- Write your draft using all of your relevant notes. Be sure to include information on the expert, such as why this person could be considered an authority on your topic. If you use the exact words that your expert used, be sure to put quotation marks around those words.
Elements of the Interview Report
• Introduction of your Main Idea
• Introduction of your expert
• New information you get from your expert (the main body of your paper)
• Your evaluation whether the interview is a success, including brief restatement of your main discoveries
Note:
• The Report is in an essay format, not the question-answer format.
• You should use the summarizing, paraphrasing, and quoting techniques that we have covered.
*Adapted from
Trimbur, John. The Call to Write. Second Edition. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 2002. Chapter 7 and 17.
Leki, I. (1998). Academic writing: Exploring processes and strategies, Second edition. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.
Materials provided by Professor Tony Silva.
Creative Commons Rights. All Rights reserved. Xianfeng Mou 2009.
