Living Sources: Interviews and Surveys

One thing that is a important when conducting interviews and surveys is to interview experts. Here are a few things to do to in order to find these experts are: check your sources and note who the authors are, look under a specific category in the phone book, ask your friends and instructors if they (or someone they know) can help, check your school's faculty directory, check encyclopedias, and check the internet. It also important to interview nonexperts, or people that have experienced and are knowledgable about the topic. Another important thing is that when you are conducting an interview it is important to make it natural, like a conversation. I also learned that conduct a successful survey first you must define your goals and audience. It's important to know what you want to know and who you want to get this information from. Then you have to choose your approach and decide what type of questions you want to use. Finally, you have to devise a way to distribute the surveys in a way that they will reach your targeted audience. In order to collect data for my project, I plan to conduct interviews among my friends because my targeted audience is teenage girls. I also plan on analyzing magazine ads and discuss their effects on the viewers.