This course in methods is not only about learning textbook definitions and concepts, but it also is about engaging your sociological imagination as it relates to actual research. For this project, you will interview someone in order to collect empirical qualitative data to examine an issue of interest to you. For most social scientists, we are interesting in either examining the behavior or attitude (or both) of individuals in society. Gaining an insight into the lived experience of individuals is one important way we gain an understanding of social processes in society.
For this project, you will engage in several activities that will lead to the final product submission, a research paper due at the end of the term. The steps–further elaborated in this module, involve the following:
Part I: RQ and Interview Guide: For this part, it will be important to articulate what is the main research question you will be advancing and trying to address in your research paper. Second, you will need to draft and submit an interview guide–a guide that you will use during your interview. I will provide you feedback on this guide before you do the interview.
For Part 1 of your research qualitative project, please use the template provided to do the following:
1. Articulate a research question. You will be conducting an interview research project, so you can interview anyone on anything of interest to you. For example, you can interview your neighbor to try to understand how they associate their neighborhood environment with issues of race and ethnicity. The important thing here is to articulate a research question. Please refer to the lecture materials to assist you with that as I covered how to designed a research question.
2. Interview guide: Now that you have a research question, please draft an interview guide. The template that I provided includes guidance on the interview guide. The importance of an interview guide is to help you structure your interview. Please refer to my audio lecture on qualitative interviewing to help you out on drafting an interview guide.
Instructions:
a. Please download the template and fill it in with your research question and the questions for your interview guide. Your interview guide will assist you conduct an interview. After you have finished your interview guide, you should proceed to conduct your semi-structured qualitative interview and then proceed to Part 2 of this project and transcribe your interview.
b. For Part 1, you should submit a Word document with the two components above or insert the text in this submission.
