Oral Interviews of a major life event for 3 people in different life stages of development (8 pages not including appendix) (This is an oral history using qualitative research methods)
Life Event First, this assignment will require you to identify a life event that will be your primary area of focus. This life event can be a marriage, birth of a child, a divorce, graduation from school, loss of a loved one, surviving a traumatic event (e.g., natural disaster; car accident; violent crime), etc. Life events are circumstances (can be positive or negative) that occur in all of our lives that require us to adapt to them. For this assignment, choose a life event that impacted at least 3 generations. You can include yourself as one generation if you’d like. A generation for the purpose of this paper involves people who are in different phases of life. A child, a young adult, and an older adult would represent different stages of development. An adolescent, a middle age adult, and an older adult would also represent different stages of development. You are being asked to identify a life event and to interview three people representing different stages of development about the same event. (Unless you choose to write about this life event from your own perspective, which means you would only interview two people). Thus, the people you interview need to be in different stages of development. Life course theory suggests that where we are in the life course helps to define how we experience life events. During the interview, you will need to develop questions that help you to understand the individual’s reaction to the event. For example: • How did the event affect them (their thinking, their behavior, and their attitudes)? • How did the person react or adapt to the event? (Explore certain coping or adaptive patterns) • How did the event impact their relationships with others? Develop a set of questions that will help you obtain more information on these questions. Make sure that your questions are age appropriate if you are interviewing children. Ask the same question to each person you interview to allow for comparison. During your interview, seek to understand how each person perceived the event and identify the differences in how they reacted to the event. Formulate your interview questions prior to the interview. You should first obtain the permission of each interviewee to interview them. Have them initial a statement indicating their willingness to participate in the assignment. Let them know the information you gather will be confidential and will only be used for the purpose of this assignment. Use false or pseudo names in the write-up of the interview. Example Katrina was a hurricane that impacted many people in Louisiana and Mississippi. Mary’s Aunt, nephew and grandmother lived in the New Orleans area and had to be evacuated as a result of the storm. There was much disruption in their lives because of leaving their home and losing personal items. Mary, a middle-aged adult; Bill, a 19 year old; and Bertha, a 72 year old, were all interviewed about how the storm impacted them to include their thoughts, perspective, behaviors, reactions, and lessons learned.
Writing the Paper: After you have finished interviewing each person and recording their responses, you are ready to write the paper. Use the organizational scheme being described here. These are the major sections of the paper. * Introduction Describe the life event that will be the focus of your interviews and why you chose this topic. o Describe the settings in which these interviews have taken place. o Briefly describe the people you are interviewing. No identifying information is necessary other than demographic data such as “a 51 year old Asian woman.” What was your hypothesis about the likely responses of the individuals you interviewed to the life event? How did their responses differ or coincide with what you had expected? *The Interviews Identify the list of questions that were used in your interviews. Share the responses of your interviewees by identifying the question and a summary response to each question. If you choose to simply write a narrative that reflects the questions asked and their responses, that is also acceptable. It is your choice. This section should include content only from your interviews and not your opinion. Place the responses in an appendix at the end of the paper. What was your experience doing these interviews? What was most challenging? What did you enjoy about this process? * Analysis: The content in this part of the paper is an analysis of your interviews. This is the most important part of the paper. • Review Erikson the developmental milestones for the developmental stage that your interviewees are in (e.g., middle childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, etc.), and comment on these. • In addition, you may also want to relate the analysis to some of the other developmental or intergenerational theories that have been discussed in class and your text that you find most relevant (e.g., Fowler’s theory of spiritual development). • How can these theories explain some of the reactions or forms of coping that were utilized by those you interviewed? What insights did you develop as a result of these interviews? Conclusion What did you learn about how one’s place in the life course impacts how various life events affect people? What are the implications for understanding human behavior in the social environment? How will this assignment inform your future work as a social worker?
