What would you ask differently if you were to do additional interviews?

Written assignment
The written assignment follows from the research exercise itself. The paper should be no more than 2500 words. (Please include a word count when you turn in the paper. The word count pertains to the paper only, and not to your interview notes.) You will have far more empirical material that you can possibly write about in 2500 words, so you must be selective. In the paper, clearly labeled and in the following order, include:
1. Abstract (100-200 words). A summary of your study that provides the reader with the following information: your research question, your motivation for studying that question, your sampling strategy, your key findings, and the implications of those findings.
2. Introduction (300-400 words). Describe and motivate your research question. Why is it sociolog- ically interesting? Did your research question change at all over the course of conducting the assignment? Why are in-depth interviews appropriate for answering this research question?
3. Sample and interviewing (700-800 words). Whom did you interview and why? Whom would you ideally choose to interview if you had more time and resources to do the project; how does your ideal sample differ from your actual sample? Other questions you will want to address in this sec- tion include: (1) What challenges did you face in getting people to agree to an interview and how did you build rapport with your interviewees? (2) Did you feel that interviewees were forthcoming with the information you hoped to collect? (3) Were some questions particularly good/bad, and did you modify your questions at all between the interviews? (4) What would you ask differently if you were to do additional interviews?
4. Analysis (1000-1200 words). Refer to the preliminary coding and comparisons you did, above, and develop a discussion of your interview data that is organized around key themes. Be sure to make clear to the reader how each theme relates back to your underlying research question. Use detailed evidence in the form of direct quotations from your interviews to support your points. If you didn’t record your interviews or are paraphrasing an interviewee’s words, make that clear to the reader. Obviously, you should try to present the evidence fairly. For example, if a specific statement is not representative of other things an interviewee said, you should say so. Though a reader won’t have the transcriipt of the entire interview, the evidence you present should be representative of what happened and was said.
5. Conclusion (500-700 words). The conclusion should summarize your main argument, which an- swers your research question. Someone reading your paper should know exactly what your re- search question is (even if it changed over the course of the assignment), your answer to the ques- tion, and see empirical evidence to support your points. It need not be the case that every reader would agree with your conclusions, but the paper should contain enough evidence so that readers can decide for themselves.
You are also expected to submit your interview guide. The interview guide is the document that you used to conduct the interviews, showing all questions and prompts that guided the interviews. If you
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Sociology UN3010 Spring 2022
changed the guide at some point during the project because some of the questions had to be worded differently, for example, make sure to include all versions of the guide.
In addition, you have to submit the relevant interview transcriipts that you used for the analyses. Ideally, you should transcribe the entire interview for all your subjects. But to make the assignment less time consuming, we ask you to only include the transcriipts of the parts of the interview that are relevant for the analysis. That means that you don’t have to transcribe the parts of the interview where you build rapport with the interviewees, for example. But we want to see the transcriipts of the parts of the conversation where the key themes of the interview emerged.

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