From The Peopling of New York City
Contents |
Source Study #5: Ethnographic Interviews
Source Study #5 is an exercise in engaging in an ethnographic interview with representative members of your ethnic community. Part of this interview will be recorded in note form and documented with photographs, but part of it will also be filmed; that film may then be used on the course wiki site.
Objectives
1. To learn how to conduct an interview.
2. To build a deeper understanding of the chosen community, now that demographic data, a review of the literature, and your own participant-observer experience in the community has given you some background.
3. To understand the ways that individual experiences (your interview subjects’ experiences) mesh and/or conflict with the larger community’s experiences as reflected in other forms of data.
4. To produce a cultural sketch of several representative individuals in order to make human the experiences of the community as a whole.
The Process
1. Identify several interview subjects. You may have already met people who would be willing to be interviewed; you may also know people who are part of this community already. In addition, Professor Lavender can help you arrange to meet with individuals who represent your community who are part of the College community. Don’t forget that you want your interviews to be representative and to illustrate variety – both males and females, young people as well as older, etc. 2. Make arrangements with your interview subject to conduct the interview under appropriate conditions (in a safe, neutral place, where both you and your subjects feel comfortable). Tell your subjects about the process (including the information about how the material is to be used). Get their permission to interview them and to provide access to the content of your interview with them (we will discuss releases in more detail below). 3. Conduct your interview. Take notes, take photographs, take video. 4. Now it is time to “write up” the interview. This means you will write a narrative account of what your subject has said. This will be written in second-person voice. 5. This write-up will be illustrated with direct quotations, and with photographs. In addition, you may wish to edit the video you took of the interview to include on the Wiki site at this point – think about moments in the interview which were especially illustrative or moving.
The Assignment
What you will hand in as “Source Study #5":
Your working group will submit (jointly) your results from 4 and 5. Results from 5 will be uploaded to your wiki page and captioned.