Summary – Week 9

This week we asked students to read through several full transcripts and consider what they learned that was different from the experience of doing the interview in person. Many students mentioned that they wished that they had slowed down and focused more on the interviewee’s responses. They felt that they often cut off something he or she was going to say. It is so important, particularly when interviewing older people to give them time to reflect on the question and think about it. Silence is often uncomfortable for the interviewer, but necessary. Several students do employment interviewing in their everyday job and indicated how different research interviewing is from it. In research interviewing you must focus on several things at one time: making sure they answered question, getting ready to ask the next question, being aware that someone else is going to hear the interview recording, and try to appreciate what the person is saying.

Some students commented that the sheer volume of data felt overwhelming. A half hour interview can often generate 20-25 single spaced spaces. Multiplied by our 35 participants, that is a great deal of information to process! Some interesting insights came from the students’ review of the transcripts: “many participants had lost their original physician to retirement or death, and had to find someone new.” Which is yet another loss for the oldest old. “Several participants mentioned that they take their aches and pains as just part of the aging process.” “Some women indicated that they no longer do GYN exams or mammograms.” We discussed that we wished we had followed up on these comments and gotten more information on why this is a case. As with all research this project is leading to more questions for future studies.

We finalized the two posters we will be submitting on the project for Walden’s Winter Research Symposium in Miami in January. The students seemed to have learned a lot from doing the poster and thinking about the project as a whole and how the pieces interconnect.

Lee Stadtlander