interviews

So I've completed my first interview and started to transcribe it. One thing I'd say is that I for sure underestimated the transcription procedure. Thus far it's taken me around an hour of transciption for ten to fifteen minutes of interview. I't fun though to go back and listen to what people say. I wasn't aware how much people contradict themselves until I went back and got a chance to look at it. Themese kinda pop out at you and the entire process is like a huge review. Although tedious, I think it's helpful. It does suck to hear myself on tape though. I wasn't aware of how horriblu inarticulate I was. I guess I can work on that. Although the first interview was rough, I'm confident that my second one will be a lot better. I'm going to shoot for longer more detailed answers on behalf of my interviewee.

basketball game summary

Upon walking into the stadium and seeing the crowd and the teams, I realized that athletics are one of the rare places at Southwestern that you’ll find diversity. I was struck by the percentage of African American non student fans there were compared to the number of African American players on the team. As the game started, an interesting series of events started to unfold. Although I can’t speak for the entire crowd, I was able to hear my friends and two parties, one of which was primarily comprised of African Americans and one of which was about half African American, behind me. The first thing I noticed was that although everyone was cheering pretty hard for the team as a whole, the people around me would erupt when the starting African American point guard was given the ball. The African American kids behind me knew his name, only his name, and insisted that he shoot the ball every time he got it. The adults seemed disappointed every time he passed it away, voicing their sentiments for him publicly. This may, in part, be because the point guard is very short, a senior, or a variety of other reasons but as I looked around I saw the same response from most of the African American players in the crowd. His parents or at least I assume they were his parents, were surrounded by African Americans who seemed to live and die every time he touched the ball. Although I was very aware of it, I don’t think it was something that was noticeable to the untrained eye. Halftime brought more entertainment. The athletes of the year were announced, the African American point guard and a white female golfer, and they came to the center of the court to get their trophies. After posing for pictures with their family, they exchanged what may have been the most awkward hug I’ve ever witnessed. This could be because the girl was dressed up and our point guard was sweaty and shorter than her, but the crowd seemed to think it was for other reasons. A man behind me said something along the lines of, “oh man did you see how scared that boy was to hug that girl. Haha. Man black guys just need to learn to squeeze white girls.” Although it was funny for all members of the crowd, it seemed a bit odd for two reasons. First of all why would hugging each other be something that the two athletes decided to do if they weren’t comfortable with it? My guess is that they felt pressure from the crowd to create a picture perfect moment of that it was something that they were told to do. Secondly, was the crowd’s response legitimate and why did only the African Americans react to it? Was the point guard scared to hug the white girl in front of a crowd? It seemed as though most of the white members didn’t see anything unnatural about it but it elicited quite a response out of the African American crowd.

Last Week

Last week I attended the Salon @ Wildfire which had to do with homelessness in Georgetown. The speaker was Gene Davenport, one of the directors of The Georgetown Project. It was a really interesting talk because I was able to see the community's response to the issue. I took many notes and I got a chance to talk to him afterwards. He seemed willing to participate in interviews so I just need to schedule an interview now. I might be getting somewhere finally! :)

technical difficulties

well, my recent clash with technology has reached an all-time high. looking back through the posts, i just realized that my last three posts have not been posted, nor can i find any record of having written them on my computer or my blog-homepage-thing. great.

but anyways, things have been going fairly well with my project. i've been attending the two churches on alternating sundays that i'm going to do my participant observations at, and began jotting down notes. i've found that i can do this fairly unobtrusively if i try to make it look like i'm taking notes of the sermons, such as only writing anything when a new point is displayed on the powerpoint. i've also been in contact with my two interviewees, and am in the process of deciding a time for the interviews that will work for them. that's about it, i might have my first interview later this week, and i'll update y'all on how that goes. :)

Interview problem

I have just made contact with one of my interviewees. He said he would be happy to do an interview with me, but he is very busy and asked to have two, shorter, separate interviews, rather than one long one. Have any of your interviewees requested this? I feel that it could very easily go better, because I would have more time to formulate my second line of questions, that respond to the answers, but I worry about losing track and the second interview being a repeat of the first. What do you think?

Actually

What do you guys think about doing an ethnography project looking at how "Mouthwestern" works? Sort of a comparison to how the game Telephone worked when we were little? I'm not really sure how I'd do participant observation on that, but it could be interesting? And I know that a lot of people have a lot to say about it because we've all been affected by it at some point. The only problem I foresee with doing a project on "Mouthwestern" is that the outcome I feel would be really obvious since we all know what it is and basically what it does. Would it be too lame to chose something like that? I'm thinking that maybe I could listen to conversations in the cafeteria to see what people are talking about and if it's about other students (which would be evidence of the "Mouthwestern" subculture?), or would that not be okay because I'm supposed to inform the people that I'm studying about what I'm doing. I know we talked about how people fall back into old habits fast, but if I chose to study a group of friends since I feel like they'd be more likely to let me eaves drop on them, do I have to explicitly tell them that I'm trying to see if they are gossiping or not?

Crisis!

So apparently none of my emails to our prof have gotten through and my email for my IRB form didn't go thru because they aren't in my outbox and I haven't gotten a reply from anyone, so now I'm on a quest to find a new topic that I can do on campus that doesn't require an IRB form. Does anyone have any ideas? I'm more or less hitting panic mode since I'd set everything up for my other one and my email is just not functioning... Thanks!