Over the past two and a half weeks I have been “running” all over the island conducting my semi-structured interviews. It is very reminiscent of last summer, where I spent a good amount of time on public transit in order to do surveys in peoples’ gardens and farms. I am less nervous this time around though, as I mostly contacted people I had already done the quantitative survey with (although I had to contact some new people as some respondents moved or changed jobs and thus could not be interviewed). I had also conducted interviews in my Master’s work, so this isn’t my first time (balancing letting the respondent the freedom to answer the open-ended questions, and when to chime-in with prompts to direct the interview towards the subject mater I want to hear about).
To cover my basis I have been recording with my iphone and with a digital voice recorder. Thank god I have been doing both because in a few instances one of the recordings failed.
In other news:
A fellow McGill graduate student has put together a really nice set of links about science communication, funding, and teaching. I lot of the links there are ones that I have used in the blog. It is so wonderful to see colleagues use their web presence to share resources! Here, is also another colleague who has started a blog about design and science.
Through twitter I also came to read three good posts about writing science papers (here, here, and here), and one about creating a good presentation (here).
Sustainable Resource Management Lab 