Week 3: Meet the Interviewees

Hello, and welcome back to the blog! This was the last week of preparation for me ahead of the start of the season for First Tee, and my first opportunity to gather some data. That’s why the majority of my work this week was making sure that I was as prepared as possible for that Saturday, and I broke that down into two main parts: who are the interviewees, and what will I even ask them?

First of all, it’s not as simple as saying, “so, as a Latino participant, how has First Tee excelled at getting you and your community into the sport?” Why, you may ask? After all, it would save me from having to dance around the point I’m actually trying to get to. The answer boils down to bias. If I sat down and asked you who your favorite teacher is, while also adding, “by the way, this is all for a survey we’re doing for a Mr. Tariq appreciation video,” you would be heavily inclined to answer with Mr. Tariq. After consulting Mr. Hansen and the First Tee team, the biggest thing to avoid is letting people know what the purpose of the interview is.

This thinking is supplemented by Vanja Erčulj and Ajda Šulc’s 2024 study Swayed by Leading Questions, which determines that people, especially strangers whom you haven’t built a relationship with beyond the scope of the interview, naturally want to please you and the ulterior agenda of your interview. Additionally, they note that adolescents, a significant chunk of my interviewees, are especially susceptible to this kind of guidance, making any leading question that reveals an agenda a liability. Thus, any indication that I’m trying to lead them in a certain direction is considered tampering and false data in my book.

To deter this, all of my outreach tactics have been deliberately ambiguous about the purpose of the interview. After working with the First Tee to build up a mailing list of potential junior coaches, I made sure to keep the information limited to who I’m looking for and what they need to do. While I think that may make people a little skeptical of sitting down with me and talking about something they don’t fully know about, I believe that it has to be done for the soundness of the experiment.

A large part of this week was focused on outreach, and figuring out how I’m going to get my interviews in the first place. Outside of my immediate network of people who fit my criteria, reaching out during parent pick-up/drop-off has been the strategy that I’ve planned on doing. However, especially with how limited I need to be in my advertisement, I think that strategy won’t be as fruitful as I hope. So, my question to you, my amazing readers (who probably need a question to ask me), is about what other strategies I can use to get interviewees? Furthermore, should I focus primarily on the junior coach/participant age group, or try and seek out adult coaches, board members, and parents who would have a more detailed perspective? As I approach the first data collection date, those are the two questions that I still have gaps in.

Regardless, the upcoming week is set to be my biggest one yet, and I look forward to telling you all about it in next week’s edition!