Background: I conducted two in-depth interviews in the hopes of gaining valuable insights about graduate students in cities and their housing choices. My first subject, Anna, is a 22-year-old graduate student at Harvard University, pursuing her Master’s of Science in Quantitative Genetics. My second subject, Caitlin, is a 25-year-old law student at Penn State. The interviews were both conducted virtually, through either Skype or a phone call.
I was simultaneously nervous and excited going into the interviewing process. I’ve always considered myself a pretty good listener, so I honestly thought sitting back and hearing my interviewees’ share their stories would be a walk in the park. During the interviews, however, I realized how difficult it was to not interject with my own opinions or stories – even if that was just agreeing or disagreeing with my subjects. When you’re talking to someone else, it seems unnatural to not do things like this – like we learned from The Art of Listening, we often find our own stories fun and interesting, while just sitting back and truly listening to others can be “boring”. I definitely didn’t think what my subjects were saying was boring, but I did feel like not having reciprocity in the conversation was. To combat this challenge, I tried to ask a probing question or find a segway to another key question when I felt like I needed to interject with personal anecdotes. Another issue, which just comes with the territory of doing a virtual interview, is that I felt like I was potentially missing out on body language cues that could reveal pain points or excitement. Fortunately, I had a visual component in the Skype interview with Anna, but this was a real point of concern going into my over-the-phone interview with Caitlin. Housing isn’t a topic that naturally stirs up a ton of emotion, but nonetheless, I really tried to listen carefully and use inflections in tone, etc. to guide me instead.
One of the great aspects of this interviewing process was that I could note potential insights coming up right away. With our refined research questions in the back of my mind, I felt that it was really easy to start to see the pieces fit together. For example, while talking to Anna about her roommates, I began to pick up on the fact that their school schedules and general hobbies/values seemed to be incredibly well-aligned. This struck me as important during the interview, and while creating a code sheet, my team and I decided to include “roommate homogeneity” as a common theme. Coding the actual interviews afterwards helped to solidify some of the insights that I had loosely formulated during the process, create new ones, and also notice that some weren’t critical as I first thought. Both of my interviewees also were just easy to talk to and answered questions thoroughly, which definitely made the process easier.
The combination of my interviews and my teammates’ interviews helped lead us to four new insights. By creating an interview guide together that utilized questions that led to stories, rather than dead-end questions, we were able to more deeply understand graduate students and their housing situations through our in-depth interviews.