Focusing your interests
Before you can choose an interviewee to profile, you need to know what you are trying to learn. You need to know what your “research agenda” is. This agenda may connect to a larger research agenda (e.g., for graduate students, to a thesis or dissertation topic). Alternately, you may want to use this project as a starting place to begin to map out what you are curious about.
To help focus, ask yourself:
- What are the elements of practice that interest me? What do I want to find out about the challenges and possibilities of actual work in this field? (It might be how skilled practitioners handle issues related to power or politics, or how they build relationships, or how they organize communities, or how they deal with conflicts or handle anger, or how they address issues of bias, or how they help develop a community’s capacity to address local needs, or so on.)
- If I am interested in X, what kinds of things might I be looking for?
- What are my hunches about what I might find?
- Think about the theoretical discussions (in the academic literature) that relate to what you are curious about. Ask yourself: what kinds of questions do I have after reading those discussions? What questions do they leave me with? What hunches do they lead me to have that I can explore further by looking at a real practice situation?
Write down your answers to the questions above. Not only will this process help you choose a good case and begin to define your interview questions, but it will also help you think about how you eventually will focus your analysis and write-up.