You may conduct the interviews on your own or as a group. Follow these guidelines to conduct the interviews:
- As an ethnographer, remain ethical during the interviews.
- Inform the interviewees about what you intend to do with their responses and about your resolve to protect their anonymity.
- Avoid asking questions with yes or no as answers. The point of the interviews is to get your interviewees to talk extensively.
- Tape-record the interviews and, later, transcribe them.
Perform the following tasks on your own or as a group, depending on how you conducted the interviews:
- Note five excerpts from the interviews.
Provide analytical comments to the interviewees' responses. Your comments should include answers to the following questions:
- What are the interviewees' views about good IS design?
- What are their goals for establishing IS?
- How do the interviewees' perspectives match or contradict the theories and issues you have learned so far?
- How does their experience map to the theories you studied?
- Do the lessons learned go beyond the theories?
- Do you feel that some of the theories and notions presented in the course were confirmed or rejected by your research?
- What instances helped you arrive at these conclusions?