ANalyZing your profile: Getting started
- Review the issues you laid out in the “Focusing Your Interests” exercise.
- For each issue, ask what the related literatures and/or the lessons of experience suggest to be the variation of responses possible by the interviewee. So, for example, in dealing with political superiors, planners might avoid contact, or stress technical proficiency, or try to learn about the superiors, or cultivate contact, or try to feed them information, or try to develop a trusted reputation, or try to counteract their influence, or so on.
- For each issue, assess where your interviewee “sits” in the space of variation you have imagined. To continue the above example, perhaps your interviewee tried to stress technical proficiency AND to counteract the political superior’s influence.
- For each issue, try to explore how your interviewee acted, i.e., with what style, tone, foresight, insight, sensitivity, care, blindness, preparation, arrogance, humility, and so on. Can they teach us something about how to do, or not to do, what they have done? Do you take them to be instructive? Illuminating? Suggestive? Extraordinary? Shortsighted? Why? Give reasons!
- Allow your emotional responses to the interview to provide a path for you to explore. What parts of the interview made you excited? Angry? Hopeful? What made you want wish you could call up a friend and say "Listen to this!" Let your emotions help you (help us) see more clearly the work and world at hand. But use your emotional responses as beginnings, not endpoints. Explore them. Explain not only your response but what warranted that response. Tell us why you felt a certain way.
- Write 3-5 tentative, no-commitment “hunches” about what you think is most important, interesting or instructive in the transcript (e.g., what another reader interested in your topic shouldn’t miss.)
- What have you learned from your interviewee about the issues and the possibilities that others doing similar work may face? What can others learn?
- Think about writing as if you were writing a letter to a friend, explaining what he or she might learn form this interview you’ve been able to do.
- One basic structure for your paper might be:
- An introduction posing the problems of practice you wanted to learn about, an explanation of why you chose your interviewee, and a brief overview of the case (the situation in which their actions took place).
- Excerpts from the edited transcript that illuminate or “open windows” into the issues you care about.
- Your analysis of what you’ve learned and what you think others can learn from this story.
- Your conclusions (answers to the question “so what?”
