Interviews

The interviews done of Thoreau were really interesting. They connected the studying of the transcendentalist movement that we have been doing, with our future interviewing assignment. It was helpful for both the interviewer and the person being interviewed to take part in that practice in order to experience the good and the bad of both roles. I have a lot more confidence going into the real interviews now, since prior to this practice I had only been interviewed before.

It was hard to answer questions while pretending to be someone else. For instance, there were several topics brought up where one had to go on related beliefs of Thoreau in order to answer the question. A lot of the time it was instinct based responses. Our interviews later on though will not have that same type of issue since we are directly interviewing people.

I did find that it was helpful to see how an interviewer could pull out more information from whomever they were interviewing by asking the right questions. Also important to getting out responses was the wording the questions as well as the order they were presented. This required prior preparation with focus on that idea.

These are all traits I would like to carry out into our own research and interviews of the 4H club coming up.