I conducted 2 interviews – one with my friend, Callie, who graduated last year and moved to Dallas last month and the other with my sister, Simone, who moved to NYC last month. Creating the interview guide with my team was incredibly helpful. I took a similar class as a sophomore in which we conducted interviews with a very basic guide and I found the interview process was not very smooth. Because our interview guide in this project was formatted well and had exact questions and suggestions for follow-ups I found it easy to conduct smooth interviews.
While the interview guide was great for giving the interview structure, I found that some of the questions didn’t get at exactly the answers we were hoping to get. I found on a few occasions I would have to clarify or elaborate to get a longer response from my interviewees. Also, reflecting on my choice of interview time I think I could have chosen a better time to interview my chosen people. I did both at 9 pm during the week. I tried to catch up with my sister before the interview, but she was eager to get it over with. I worry that may have affected her answers. Callie had more time and ended up eating dinner during the call. I could have been more clear about how long I intended the interview to be.
I came away with many insights and some surprising answers from my 2 interviews. Callie moved in with her boyfriend because he got a job in Dallas and she didn’t want to continue to do a long distance relationship, as they had done in college. I had assumed that she was just hanging out and applying to jobs from home, but I learned she was doing a lot more than I expected to seek out community in the Dallas area. She was going to networking events, PokemonGo meetups, church events, and more. It was hard to say whether the actions she was taking to actively build community were effective because she had just moved in a month before. I’d be interested to do a follow-up interview in 6 months to see if she has formed any lasting relationships from any of these events.
I wasn’t very surprised by my sister’s behaviors in terms of community seeking. She is an extrovert and she did just move to a dense urban area, but because we grew up right outside of NYC, a lot of people we grew up with moved there after graduation too. So, I wasn’t surprised when she told me she wasn’t actively joining groups and seeking out events to meet new people. But, the interview did lead her into talking about her year in Amsterdam doing a Fulbright. I found she did many of the same things that Callie was doing to seek out community. From both interviews I found that the more immediate and lasting connections came from not shared interest groups or networking events, but from leveraging past connections. For example, my sister went abroad in Amsterdam during college, and had a friend from that experience who knew someone who worked at a coffee shop/yoga studio and she suggested that my sister join. This opened up a new community to Simone through working there and sharing a space and I think this was one of her main sources of community during that year.
Overall I think my interviews combined with my teammates’ interviews gave us a lot of insight about our scope and young professionals’ actions to seek or not seek out community in dense urban areas.