Conducting an In-Depth Interview

This was a pretty straightforward article. Some suggestions the article made about in-depth interviewing were

• create open-ended questions
• have some pre-planned questions while being flexible enough for natural flow of conversation
• seek clarity, interpretation, and understanding
• listen, and keep discussion conversational
• remember to record the responses, your observations, and your reflections
• watch out for nonverbal cues
• release the feeling that you need power or to be in control

The author then examines the seven steps of interviewing

1. Thematizing - clarifying your purpose. What do you want to find out?
2. Designing - make a list of issues, and then some specific questions and follow-up questions. Make an interview guide containing facesheet, actual questions, and post-interview comment sheet.
3. Interviewing - three parts: establishing yourself to the interviewee, put respondent at ease, and then listen and observe as you conduct your interview. Do so by using active listening and audio recording, and you must be patient and flexible.
4. Transcribing - use the audio tape to write out every question and response exactly as they occurred, and then include your notes in highlighted text.
   
5. Analyze - figure out the meaning of the interview. Find common themes, patterns, etc
6. Verifying - use triangulation to check the validity of your information - compare it to past interviewees, past research, have someone fresh read over your data, etc
7. Reporting - share what you have learned; write a report!

As I said above, this article was pretty straightforward. Having participated on Newswatch16 as photog for the reporters who interview people all over Tompkins County, and having conducted some interviews before myself, these are pretty much the same techniques I have encountered. I never needed to write down the entire transcript before though, it having been mostly on video and for video, but in Second Life that shouldn't be too hard since it's all text based. Also, I'm not sure I've ever made an exact interview guide, although I can certainly see its usefulness when conducting multiple interviews at a time. Overall, this should be helpful at least as an overview when we conduct our interviews in Second Life.

New Avie

My new character :D

ps. Why do clothes have to be so completely clingy? In real life, a tshirt would not form to your cleavage, it would just spread out across. This needs to be fixed. And let's not even get into pants...
pps. After you take a picture, the character does an action where she puts her hands to her head as if literally filing the image away into her memory. Right after, she smiles. That's what I caught (after a few tries) in the last picture.

Guns, cars, and more crappy lag

So we tried a few more places today again in class - we went to a junkyard to buy some free weapons and vehicles, and then tried to go to a combat sandbox to shoot and ride them (respectively). EXCEPT I GOT KICKED OFF THREE TIMES! This seriously is so frustrating. I like playing at home much better where I really can just quickly reboot (although still that can be annoying, but it's something I've come to accept).

Here's a picture of me freezing the very first second I log on.
Sure, this usually happens when you first log on, as things take time to rez. BUT THIS LASTED OVER FIVE MINUTES and I eventually just had to restart. Gah!

Back to a girl!

I've finally converted myself back to a girl, but a different one than I was before. I didn't try as hard to make it look like "me" although I still want it to have the basic similarities. I'm thinking of possibly changing her again sometime soon, but not right now.

I explored random places, including an Asian styled place. Was sweet and serene, not too many people around. Here I am at the little lake there, it had various pose balls all around. For some reason I am completely fascinated with using the pose balls and then taking pictures, I have near 35 so far.

There was a picturesque bridge with some pose balls for couples kissing and cuddling, and I tried one out but right after I took the picture, I went to Photoshop to convert it to a jpeg and when I returned a guy had taken up the male pose in the cuddle! I was a little taken aback, and was about to take a photo of that, but he moved before I could do it. He said hi or something but I was a slightly too creeped out to respond. I know it's a videogame, but personal space!

Here's the bridge picture I took first. After all that I went to a casino because I really wanted to try out those camping chairs. I've seen that some of them kick you off if you turn idle for a long time, but I have to do some reading, so I'll try to check it every once in a while. I looked at a couple casinos and some had really nice payouts and the idle was turned off, but they were all full. I finally found an empty one that's paying two Lbucks every fifteen minutes, but if you play the slot machine a few times you can win upgrades, and you were allowed 10 idle cycles before it kicked you off. Using only ten Lbucks I upgraded mine to 5 Lbucks every 8 minutes AND I got the idle to turn off. Sweet :)

Edit: woot, I won 85 dollars! I let it go while I went to bed and apparently it stayed connected for just over two hours. Not too bad for a night's sleep. :D

Today we went to a couple cool places in class: a recreation of Rome, the Spaceflight center, and a beta-phase "real-life" hotel. Out of the three, Rome was my favorite, although I feel like if lag was less I would have enjoyed all three much more. Will have to check them out when I get home. Here's a picture of me as a boy, at the Spaceflight center sitting on a large molecule!I think it's very cool that people have built places like these in the game. I can't even imagine how complex it really is, or how much time it took to build. I'm guessing it was a team of people, not just one person? I have no real idea though, I sure there are some determined people on here.

For an online class, I think the hotel setting might be best. It was filled with chairs and tables. Although I guess in SL it doesn't matter if you stand four hours on end, hah. However, like I said above, it's really hard to completely enjoy these areas when all of us go to one place because even with only a third of us at a place at one time the lag was still crazy. Maybe if we were all at our own home computers it would be at least only one server being overloaded and not our own connection too.

As for playing a guy, I really don't see too much of a difference in how people treat me. I know I dislike it more, I personally prefer playing a character in my own image.

Another note: I've been hearing some dissidence in class about playing the game. I think it all boils down to access and lagging problems that are causing such a negative impression of the game. I think most people aren't trying too hard to play outside of class--although some certainly are. But that's what they need to do, because when I play at home connections speed is much faster, and sometimes a simple reboot of the game refreshes the connection well enough. But here, rebooting is not as feasible thanks to the school's computers.

Ok, class is ending. Hopefully I can play a lot more this week then I had been able to next week.

Opposite gendered avatar

Making my avatar into a boy has been very frustrating. I was having the worst trouble making his face not look girly! Finally I enlisted the help of my boyfriend in creating my character, and we tried to make the avatar as similar to my boyfriend as possible-- to varying success. Some aspects captured his essence - like the general body shape (although SL really makes some body parts weird when manipulated) as well as his goatee and glasses. Hair was a huge problem - his real hair is a dark, dirty blonde.. one not very easy to find in SL. Even his hair style was difficult to find even though to me, in real life, it just seems a regular, simple hair style. In the end we settled for brown hair in the closest resembling style we could find. I did find a pretty cool, very typical of my boyfriend, outfit though. Here's a picture of him leaning up against a bar:
You can't really see, but those are imitation Birkenstocks on his feet like those he always wears. In this picture though, his feet are kind of sinking into the ground...