Interviews and Writing

Field Note Portfolio

• Due March 18
• Should document 2 interviews/periods of participant observation
• Includes jottings, expanded field notes, and final vignette

Interviews as Data

• Provides data on subjective lived experiences
• Needs to be processed and written up into something easy to read

From Field Notes to Vignette

• You will need to figure out which parts of your interviews/interactions are significant and representative
• From your field notes, you should write a narrative description of what happened in that moment

Vignette: a brief evocative description, account, or episode.

Questions to ask

• How do I organize data? How can I include my informants’ perspective or worldview?
• How am I representing my informants? Have I given my reader enough details to visualize or “hear” my informant?
• What sense of place am I offering?
• What assumptions, positions, and tensions do I bring to my interpretations?

"They order two fish and chips and two glasses of water.” “Cheap. I’m surprised they didn’t ask to split one meal,” Erin mumbles. “When they are done I put the check on the table and tell them I will be right back to collect it for them. I go into the kitchen and when I come back, there is a ten-dollar bill, a dime, a nickel, and a penny on the table.” “How much is the bill?” I ask. “Ten fifteen.” “That makes me so mad . . . ,” Erin begins. “But,” Rae smiles, “the woman had left her coat on the chair. They were in such a hurry to get out she forgot her coat! I grab the coat, check, and money, and then I see her coming back for her coat. . . .” “I hope you kept it until they left you a better tip,” I laugh. (Donna Qualley)

This party of two guys comes in and they order thirty to forty dollars’ worth of food . . . and they stiff us. Every time. So Kaddie told them, “If you don’t tip us, we’re not going to wait on you.” They said, “We’ll tip you.” So Kaddie waited on them, and they tipped her. The next night they came in, I waited on them and they didn’t tip me. The third time they came in [the manager] put them in my station and I told [the manager] straight up, “I’m not waiting on them.” So when they came in the next night . . . [they] said, “Are you going to give us a table?” I said, “You going to tip me? I’m not going to wait on you.” (Greta Paul’s Dishing it Out, 31)

I get pushy with Rosalie, who is new like me and fresh from high school in a rural northern part of the state, about the meagerness of her lunches, which consist solely of Doritos — a half bag from the day before or a freshly purchased small-sized bag. She just didn’t have anything in the house, she says (though she lives with her boyfriend and his mother), and she certainly doesn’t have any money to buy lunch, as I find out when I offer to fetch her a soda from Quik Mart and she has to admit that she doesn’t have eighty-nine cents. I treat her to the soda, wishing I could force her, mommylike, to take milk instead. So how does she hold up for an eight- or even nine-hour day? “Well,” she conceded, “I get dizzy sometimes.” Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed

This Week

• Wednesday, Individual Conferences
• Meet in Tigert Hall 302
• Come with your overall research question and 3 questions about your research so far