10:22 Research questions and doing interviews

We spent the first part of class reviewing questions you might ask of the transcripts for the short analysis project.  Two important features of a good research question for this project are:

1. it needs to be a question that is important to writing studies
2.  it needs to be "answerable" in terms of information in the transcript

With respect to the first feature, we worked on a list of the kinds of questions that writing studies researchers might be interested in.  This list included (but is not limited to) questions about:

how interviews work
features of different Discourse communities and how they influence the way we talk about particular topics
how identities (Discourses) shape the communication dynamics in conversations (and interviews)
how Discourse affects literacy learning
attitudes about literacy, writing, school and just about anything else that will influence literacy learning
how Discourses/identities/past literacy experiences affect student attitudes toward writing/literacy
connections between literacy learning and other attitudes, activities, and identities

As you can see, this is a pretty broad list. 

Some other observations we made about how to phrase a "good" research question for this project were that the questions would  need to be asked in terms of what the transcript can show. For example, the gaming transcript cannot support an answer to questions about whether or not gaming experience helps students learn software for school=> it can only show what the participants in this interview say about their perspective on that question. 

The rest of class was spent talking about how to design interviews.  We looked at the handout on doing interviews, and we looked at a sample interview protocol. 

We noted the following.

• The beginning of the interview is a place for participants to warm up.  Ask questions that are easy to answer.
•  An open-ended, general question about your focus at the end of the introductory material can give your participant a chance to talk about your topic in his/her own language, before you begin directing the conversation to specific features of your question.
• It is a good idea to organize your interview - either chronologically, by topic, or both.
• You will probably want to ask the same questions - related to different aspects of your topic - over and over again to give your participant multiple opportunities to call up information assosciated with your focus.
• Ask lots of descriptive, tell me about, do you have a story questions, rather than questions that demand direct information.
• As you come to the end of your interview make sure to give your participant an opportunity to raise anything they want to say that you might not have covered.

For next class:
Next class will be a workshop.  You can either work on your interview protocol, or your short analysis.  For those of you who are doing interviews for your project, I will need to read through your interview protocol before you use it with your participants.  This class will be a good chance to do some work, get some feedback, so you will be sure of your protocol before you turn it in.
Blog 14: Draft an interview protocol for your research project.  If you are not doing interviews, draft an interview protocol that you could use if you decided to do your project a different way.