What questions do you wish you had asked?
I think I pretty much covered it! Although I took longer with the interview than I would have liked (I wanted her to discuss how into theater she was with concrete examples, and I might could have shortened that phase), I don’t feel like I left anything on the table.
What worked well with your approach?
I had an intended beginning, middle, and end. I began with warm-up questions (her name, her major and grade level, how long she’s been a student at UGA, etc.) and introduced my main question (what one of her passions is (she’s a theater enthusiast)), launched into a lengthy middle section in which I got her to describe to me how passionate she was by relating stories from some of her theater exploits, and wrapped it up by asking why she was so passionate and ending the interview at a logical conclusion. As I mentioned above, while my middle section was longer than it could have been (most of those 20 minutes didn’t make it into the podcast’s two-minute time frame), the stories she told a) established that she was indeed a theater buff, and b) rounded things out nicely for the conclusion.
I also did well by making suggestions—during the interview—that would help things later on. It so happens that my lavaliere microphone and recorder’s mic capabilities died a few days earlier (I confirmed with Kelcey’s help before the interview started that that was indeed the case), so I was dependent on my recorder’s stereo recording for everything. Initially she was very animated, waving and clicking a pencil as she spoke, which I feared the recorder was picking up. After she finished her first animated question, I asked her to set her pencil down and explained to her the reason why. She promptly put it down, but then sat on her hands! I told her, “No, don’t sit on your hands! Be animated! Just without the pencil.” We laughed, and although she was stiff initially, as she told me her theater stories, she began to relax and became animated once more. This is the first time I’ve had the guts to correct an interviewee during an interview; in the past I’ve just let it ride—and suffered the consequences. I’m glad I spoke up. The brief awkwardness was worth the improved sound quality. My goal is always to get my interviewee to open up, but at the end of the day, I have to have a usable product (in this case, clear audio).
What could you have done better?
Shortened the middle story-telling section.
Other Comments:
I do have one point of contention. The authors of the two reference articles disagree with each other: one says to go into interviews with a few notes and key ideas instead of written-out questions, while the other says to go in with questions. Who’s correct?
