Week 4 – So Who Are You?

Hi everyone and welcome back to my blog!  

In the past week, I have finished creating my parental consent forms for minors and have begun my interviews! As I continue to talk to more South Asian youth, I have continued to enhance my interview questions to ensure that each one is narrow or broad enough to help me learn about my interviewees’ lives. With these changes, even if it’s only part of my interviewees’ identity I hope to receive an answer to this question: Who are you?   

The Interview Process

First, I ensure that my interviewer, and their parents if they are minors, have given consent to my study, I set up the Zoom meeting. After receiving verbal consent from my participants to participate in the interview (verbal consent allows my interviewees to remain completely anonymous in my data collection and analysis), I allow Otter.ai, a transcribing service, to join the meeting, ensuring that it is recording and transcribing so I can review what was discussed after. 

During the interview, although I have a set of questions that I still continue to enhance between meetings, I try to ask more probing questions when I feel like there is more that my interviewee has to say about a certain event or topic. So far, this has led to a conversation about South Asian history and events that I would have never expected to have in different circumstances! 

Although Otter.ai does a fairly good job of transcribing the interview, there are still many things that it tends to miss or make mistakes on, like Indian names or regions. This is especially apparent when the audio quality from Zoom isn’t the best, so after each interview, I read through the transcription to make sure that all of the content is accurate. Overall, this app has been really helpful with separating dialogue as well, allowing me to make rudimentary connections on the app’s notes section as I wait for my next interviews.   

I will be holding off on writing about my thoughts on the interviews until I have had the opportunity to complete more of them. However, I can admit that learning about pieces of people’s lives, from little stories about their friends to their thoughts on the way Indian history is taught in schools, has helped me expand my perspective in ways that I hadn’t initially expected.   

Thank you so much for reading my blog, and see you next week!