COPLAC: Voices of Migration

A Draft of Interview Questions

Listed below, please find a link to a Google Doc with my interview questions.

Draft of Interview Questions

My partner, Ryan Psutka (click here for a link to his course blog), and I have chosen to interview the Greek community in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. The bolded questions in the Google Doc are general thematic outlines to get the narrator talking. If the conversation needs any guidance, the questions listed in the letter format are suggestions to help prompt the narrator for specifics. Of course, one cannot prepare/preplan the entire oral history dialogue; it must be a fluid process in which the direction of the interview is controlled equally by the interviewer and the interviewee. I am prepared to have these questions edited, so that progress with the projects can continue!

6 Comments

  1. Savannah

    Morrison and Ryan,

    The comprehensiveness and depth of this interview is phenomenal! You went to great lengths to ensure exhaustive content coverage while maintaining a personable tone. This balance of factual information and personal opinions/experiences will surely allow for a truly dynamic oral history of the Greek Community of Pittsfield. Your interview has inspired me and I’m beyond ecstatic to see the responses of your interviewees!

    • Morrison

      Thank you for your comment! One of my concerns while creating our final webpage project is to write a narrative devoid of context. Some oral history websites I visited had no context, which left me confused as to what I was observing; others had so much context that it erased the personal narrative and was portrayed more as a online textbook instead of an oral history. While devising this draft of interview questions, I attempted to strike a balance between personal experience and historical/current context. I am glad the tone we were aiming for was conveyed through the interview questions!

  2. kraus

    I definetely like the way that your link wasn’t a long URL (taking notes for my own posts here haha). Also, the set up of your questions seemed super efficient. It seems like this set up gives you the ability to pick and choose what questions you want to ask while still hitting the main points like the migrants’ lives in Greece and their goals here.

    • Morrison

      I appreciate your comment, thank you! I am glad that you found the set up of our questions efficient. I attempted to create several large, base questions in which to get the interviewee talking. If he or she needed any direction, the indented questions are examples of what could be covered under the umbrella of the general question. Overall, however, this is just an outline and I am very much prepared for the oral dialogue to flow in unexpected ways.

  3. Sarah Leaird

    I like how detailed your questions are and how they change depending on what generation your interviewee is. It might be interesting to find out if second-generation Greeks feel any disconnect from their non-Greek classmates in school.

    • Morrison

      I appreciate your comment! I completely agree, I think it will be fascinating to discover how well the second and third-generation Greeks feel connected to the Greek community, as well as to their non-Greek community members/friends. I predict that any disconnect will depend on generational and individual differences. We shall see what Ryan and I find out while conducting our interviews!

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