Reflection Paper on "Interviewing"

While reading the assigned chapter, I could not help but keep thinking about the time I was very actively pursuing a personal research project and got the chance to interview many different people about the topic - in this case, a particular religion. I had one rule that I kept to faithfully: I was not allowed to ever say to anybody "I know that already." Even if I had to listen to the basic tenets of the religion again and again and again and was in reality tired of hearing them, I would never interrupt. I had two reasons. First was that these were all different people with different backgrounds and who had different understandings of the religion. I wanted to know if there were subtle differences, even if it was simply in how they explained things to me. Second was that even if I learned one single new thing about the religion from one person, it was worth hearing everything else I already knew again. I figured that if I said "I know that already" even just once, my interviewee would start assuming I knew things and would possibly skip over some things - even in my follow up questions - that I in fact did NOT know yet. It was better to start from zero and build my way up than hold the interview on a higher level but have all these holes at the bottom.

This made me wonder though: if I had kept at that, how could I ever reach the "deeper" beliefs of the religion? If I always pretended to know nothing, yes, the basics would always be explained to me over and over again, but I'd never get beyond that. A solution I considered was to develop relationships with some of the people I interviewed and slowly build it up with them. But that would take eternity. So I realized then that perhaps my approach was a tad bit too cautious.

And another thing: when I interviewed these people, I never told them what my religion was - unless they outright asked me (which a few did). Even if they would say things like, "Well, I'm not sure what you believe in..." I would never offer an answer, I would simply smile. I always wondered if that was wrong. I never lied to any of them, but I never freely offered them the information either. Are half-truths lies?

The assigned chapter covered some of these very topics, and it made me want to redo some of my past interviews again - but like the last paragraph said, once we are finished cringing at our past mistakes, we move on and interview more people. Practice makes perfect, and everything is a learning process.

(By the way - I did maintain contact with some of my interviewees and we ended up becoming friends. In that time, they managed to figure out how much I know and have learned about their religion, and to my surprise, it's made them much more willing to answer my questions and help me understand because they know I am genuinely interested and am not just mildly curious. This proves just how terrible I am at predicting people's reactions. But as I said, this is a learning process, and I'm learning!)

One last thing though - while we can learn many things about interviewing in this chapter and it was a great, informative read, a big chunk of it is concerned with tapes and tape recorders, things that are now obsolete. In another research project I was involved in a little under a year ago (an actual UP project this time under the UP Sentro para sa mga Industriyang Likha at Kultura (UP SILK), headed by CAL Dean Dr. Elena R. Mirano), I had to tape my interviews and hardly any of the things in the chapter were still accurate. With our cameras and cellphones and new gadgets, it is no longer an issue when to turn to the next side of the tape. You can record as long as you wish. And people are so accustomed to being recorded and filmed, it might be even more difficult to find someone who still gets nervous than someone who wouldn't give a second glance to the recording device. I would think that a problem now is no longer so much how to record, but perhaps the format in which to keep our data. With technology evolving as fast as it is, will we still be able to access our recorded interviews in ten years? Or is it important nowadays to constantly update and "re-save" our files into different formats every few years? It is something to consider.