Sharing advice for carrying out Interviews, focus group and creating my survey.

After a long conversation via skype with Mark Illes last Wednesday I felt much more focussed and aware of what I wanted to gain when carrying out my interviews and focus group.

With my inquiry question 'Does a teaching role within the arts impede the opportunity to perform?' I knew that I would be looking to seek opinions from three main perspectives in order for me to establish a well balanced argument.

• The first perspective that I wanted to look at was from a performers (professional and in training) to establish what assumptions training performers held and what professionals had actually experienced.
• The second perspective was from a teachers within the arts (professional and in training) to again establish their assumptions whilst training and the realities in the profession.
• The final perspective that I looked to gain was that of casting directors to establish exactly they were looking for and any advice about what they liked and didn't like.

When exploring these perspectives I found that many people fell in to more than one category with performers being teachers aswell.This is exactly the area that my inquiry and title is trying to focus in on. Performing teachers/teaching performers whichever way round exist and I want to know their experiences and whether it was something they had planned to combine and any advice surrounding this career choice.

I struggled for some time to come up with a well balanced set of interview questions as I was trying to look at a lot of different perspectives. During our discussion Mark mentioned that he had used purposive questioning techniques which were adapted to suit each individual. This then gave me the idea to create three different sets of interview/focus group questions in order for me to maximise the benefits and eliminate any irrelevant questioning. This advice was really helpful and this purposive approach has helped me to distinguish between all parties involved.

Since then I have carried out my focus group with three teachers who all have previous performance experience which I felt was very beneficial and informative. I have also carried out interviews with casting professionals and a fellow performing teacher. I have a few more interviews planned so hopefully schedules permitting these will all be finished by the end of this week!

When looking to create my survey I decided this purposive approach was useful but to realistically gain as many opinions from across the spectrum I felt one survey would have to allow for all differing perspectives. I felt this could be a tall order as I wanted the assumptions-opinions-experiences shared to create a set if statistics on which I can then start to see a pattern and interpret in order to bring an answer to my inquiry title knowing I have sourced the widest spectrum of opinions available to me. I hope my survey will be answered more by experienced professionals though but is still open the training professionals in the arts if they wish. My reason for this is that my interviews of training professionals would give me an idea of the type of questions and assumptions that they felt needed answering and guidance on. Then my other interviews, focus groups and survey of professional performers, teachers and casting professionals could answer these.

If you haven't already please share your opinions by participating in my survey! Your opinions are so important and it will ONLY take approximately ten minutes! Use your voice have your say.

Survey link: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FSL9XHS

 

Thank you!