Interview Assignment

Interview Assignment Instructions

The purpose of this assignment is to provide you with an intergenerational learning opportunity to explore many of the concepts that will be discussed in lectures and course readings. To complete this assignment, you will need to interview an older person (60 years of age or older) weekly over the course of five weeks about five different course topic areas (e.g., barriers to leisure in later life, leisure and retirement, leisure, aging, and place, leisure and technology in later life, and leisure and social connections in later life).

This paper is worth 50% of your final grade and is due by 11:59pm on Sunday, feb 28th, 2021.

Choosing an Interviewee

You may choose to interview an older family member, neighbor, community member or any older person you are familiar with. While this person does not need to reside in Ontario they must be 60 years of age or older and capable of providing their own informed consent (i.e., they must be able to understand what is involved with participating in this assignment and able to agree to participate on their own). Due to the current staffing challenges in long-term care, students are not permitted to interview an older person who is currently living in a personal care home (assisted living or 50+ apartment buildings are fine, provided that the older person is able to take their own phone calls or manage their own computer technology). If you do not know an older person who would like to participate in this project, please let me know and I will connect you with an older Ontario community member who has expressed interest in this assignment.

Obtaining Informed Consent from Potential Interviewee

Please provide your selected older person with the letter from me explaining this assignment and ask them to review it. This letter must be provided in a socially distanced manner (e.g., emailed, mailed, dropped off in mailbox or under door, read over the phone). If your potential interviewee has any questions about participating that you are unable to answer, please ask them to contact me at 2049908038. . Please make sure to provide this person with sufficient time to make their decision about participating. Do no place any pressure on the person to participate in this assignment if they appear hesitant.

If after reading the letter the older person is interested in participating, please ask them to sign the participant consent form and return it to you in a socially- distanced manner (e.g., scanning and emailing the document to you, mailing it back to you, you picking it up through some contactless method). An email stating that the older person has reviewed the explanation letter and provides their consent to participate in this assignment may be substituted for a signed consent form. Please ask the person to send this email to you.

Submit a scanned digital copy of this completed consent form (or consent-related email) to the Interview Assignment dropbox on psbn prior to beginning your interviews on

th
me for instructions about how to proceed. You will also need to submit an Oath of

February 12

. If you are unable to submit this consent prior to this deadline, please contact

1

Confidentiality along with this consent form that states that you will not disclose the identity of your interviewee, nor anything that is discussed in your interviews with anyone other than the instructor (i.e., through your paper).

Preparing for Each Interview

Each interview in this assignment is designed to supplement your course learning (e.g., lecture content and readings for each of the five weeks) with the real-world perspectives and experiences of your older person interviewee. As a result, you will need to design five different interview guides (i.e., question sets) that each contain five to eight questions for each of your interviews (i.e. one for each of the five topic areas). The questions contained in each of the five interview guides should reflect the content that we are discussing in that given week (e.g., barriers to leisure, leisure and retirement, leisure, aging, and place, etc.). Since every student in this course will have a different understanding of the topic areas and, likely, interviewees from very different backgrounds, each student will ask different questions in their interviews. Your interview guides do not need to be reviewed by me prior to your interviews, but they will need to be submitted along with your assignment.

When crafting your interview questions, aim to have them demonstrate a degree of insight about the material (i.e., make sure you have completed the readings for the week and reviewed the lecture content for the Monday and Wednesday class before you write our questions). You should also try to make your questions interesting and directly applicable to the older person you are interviewing (i.e., make sure that they connect to the older person by asking them about their perspectives, attitudes, or experiences about the topic area for the week). Questions may also be used to delve into topic areas that are of particular interest to you (e.g., if you are interested in technology’s role in leisure, maybe you ask a few specific questions about the ways your interviewee might integrate technology into their leisure, if they do at all) or to further explore specific examples that we have discussed in class (e.g., “this week in lecture we discussed [some example of a leisure topic]. Have you ever encountered this experience or know someone who has? Please tell me about it.)

Below are some examples of questions that you could choose to ask participants in you first interview:

Interview Topic: Barriers to Leisure in Later Life

2

What leisure activities do you currently participate in? Why do you like participating in these activities?

Are there leisure activities that you would like to be participating in that you are currently not able to? If so, what is stopping you from participating in these activities?

Follow- up questions: How has COVID-19 impacted your leisure activities? How has transportation impacted your leisure activities (e.g., locations only accessible by car)?

This week in class we discussed the ways that ageism (e.g., discrimination based on age) can impact older people in their leisure time. Can you describe your thoughts on this? Has age ever played a role in you not being able to engage in an activity? Please explain.

Follow up questions: Have you ever been told that you are too young/too old to participate in a leisure activity? If so, how did this make your feel? Do you feel there are enough activities in our community for you and friends your age to participate in? Why or why no?

With regard to the language of your questions, you should aim to design your questions so that they are open-ended (e.g., they shouldn’t be answerable with a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer). To help to increase your grade on this assignment, please avoid asking the same basic questions in each of the five interviews (e.g., don’t ask your interviewee “what is your experience with [insert generic topic] in each of your interviews). Finally, please aim to keep your questions professional and respectful. Your interviewee is being very generous with their time and we want to honour that in all interactions.

While you will want to collect some basic demographic information about your older person interviewee if they are comfortable sharing it (e.g., their age, their current living situation (e.g., independently, with family, in a rural or urban environment), their relationship status (e.g., married, divorced, widowed), whether they have children or grandchildren, their cultural/racial background, etc.), please do not ask the person to share any overly personal information (e.g., their financial status, their sexuality, their mental or physical health status). Interviewees may choose to share this information with you in your interviews (particularly if they are familiar to you), but please make sure that you are not directly eliciting it though your questions.

Finally, over the course of your interviews you should try to develop a sense of the types of leisure activities and resources that your interviewee currently engages in/with, their general leisure interests, as well as any specific leisure barriers that they might be facing. This information will be necessary for you to complete the subsequent Leisure Services/Resource Planning Assignment (separate instructions will be provided for this assignment).

Interview Logistics

Interview Format

Unless the older person that you have selected to interview currently resides in the same household as you, all interviews MUST take place remotely and comply with current public health guidelines regarding social distancing. Interviews may be completed via phone, via teleconferencing software (e.g., FaceTime, Zoom) or via email (not encouraged, but might be preferable to some interviewees).

3

Interview Length

You should aim to have your interviews last approximately 45 minutes. Slightly shorter or longer interviews are okay, but aim to have the interviews last a minimum of 30 minutes and no longer than one hour. This will help to make sure that you have an appropriate and manageable amount of content for your paper writing.

Interview Dates/Times

Time has been set aside during our regular Friday 9:30am-10:20am lecture time slot on February

th th th th th
12 and 26 , as well as March 5 , 12 and 19 for you to complete these interviews. If this time

does not work for your interviewee, please select another mutually agreed upon time to complete your interviews.

Completing your Interviews

Follow-up Questions

Have your questions prepared and ready to go before beginning each interview. While you should try to stick to this interview guide, it’s okay to ask follow-up questions if you do not understand an answer that has been provided (e.g., you are permitted to ask questions like “Can you tell me a little bit more about _____?” or “Can you give me an example of the types of activities that you engage in related to ____?”. If you do ask these types of follow-up questions, make sure to include them in your interview guide or interview notes.

Once you begin working with your interviewee, if you find that they tend to provide fairly short answers to questions, you may want to increase the number of planned or follow-up questions that you ask to ensure that you will have sufficient content to write your paper. Conversely, if your interviewee tends to provide longer answers, you may want to include closer to five planned questions in subsequent interview guides.

Interview Notetaking

While you are not permitted to audio-record these interviews (this process requires specific ethics permissions and protocols around the storage of data), you will need to take notes that capture your interviewees responses to your questions in each interview. Not only will these notes help you to write your interview paper, they will also need to be submitted along with your question guides for each of the five interviews. Point form notes are completely fine and you do not need to worry about writing down verbatim quotes, though you may choose to write down one or two if you find them particularly powerful. Please make sure not to record the person’s real name in your notes (use a pseudonym in your notes and paper).

Enjoyable, Respectful, and Ethical Interview Approach

Rather than formal interviews, try to approach these interactions with your interviewee as conversations. It’s okay if you address questions in a different order than you had originally intended or if the interviewee doesn’t have a lot to say about a certain topic area. Just try to make sure that most of the points you want to cover in your interview guide in one way or another.

I truly want this assignment to be a positive and interesting experience for both you and your older person interviewee. With that in mind, please remember that the interviewee ALWAYS has the right to refuse to answer any question(s) that make them uncomfortable or to end an

4

interview at any time. If your interviewee is not able to complete all of their interviews for any reason (e.g., they are ill, they are too busy, they decide they no longer wish to participate at all), please let me know and will make alternate plans for you to complete this assignment.

Completing the Interview Time Log

After each of your five interviews, make sure to complete an entry in the Interview Assignment Time Log (this can also be found on psjd along with the assignment instructions). In this log, make sure to record the topic area of the interview, the date, the duration of the interview (e.g., 48 minutes), as well as how the interview was conducted (e.g., phone call), This time log will need to be submitted along with your paper, interview guides, question response notes, and TCPS 2 Ethics Tutorial certificate of completion.

After the Interviews

After you have completed the interviews, please send a thank you email or note to your interviewee to demonstrate your appreciation for their time and assistance with this assignment.

Since this assignment is taking place within the midst of a very stressful time in our society, it is possible that your interviewee may be experiencing some strong emotions (e.g., grief, loneliness). As a result, I have compiled a list of Manitoba-based mental health resources that can be provided to the participant if they are interested. This list can be found on SA low along with the assignment instructions and should, again, be provided in a social distanced manner. If you feel that the older person you are interviewing may be in severe psychological distress, please let me know immediately.

If the older person you are interviewing discloses that they may be experiencing elder abuse (e.g., physical, emotional, or psychological harm; damage to or loss of financial assets or property), please also let me know immediately.

Writing Your Interview Paper

The final step for this assignment is to write a 15 to 20-page paper (excluding bibliography) that summarizes the information that you obtained through your interviews. You can feel free to write either in the first or third person for this paper, whichever feels more appropriate to you. Keep in mind that you must ensure the anonymity of your interviewee in this paper, so you will want to assign them with a pseudonym. This paper should not just be a report of what yourinterviewee said, but rather an analysis of how your interviewee’s perspectives and experiences relate to what can be found in the literature. If you require some inspiration or examples about how to go about writing your paper, have a look at the discussion sections of some of the assigned readings from this course that involved interview research. Before submitting you paper, make sure to ask your interviewee whether they would like to review the content or your interview notes (just to make sure that they are comfortable with what they disclosed and your interpretations). If they are uncomfortable with any disclosures, discuss what edits might be appropriate.

Paper Formatting

Your paper should be between 15-20 double-spaced pages (excluding bibliography) and should include page numbers. Please use 12-point Arial or Times New Roman font and 2.54cm margins

5

(listed as ‘normal’ in Word). Assignments should be submitted in PDF or Word format. Please include a title page with your name, student number, the assignment name, and course number.

Sections to Include in Your Paper

Introduction (1/2 to 1 page)

In this section you should introduce me to your interviewee with a brief synopsis of their background (e.g., their age, their current living arrangements and how long they have lived there, relationship status, cultural or racial background, other general information that gives a picture of who they are as a person). In this section you will also want to include a description of the leisure activities that your interviewees currently enjoys or has enjoyed.

Analysis of Interview Content (2.5 to 4 pages for each of the five interviews)

In five separate titled subsections (one for each of the interview topics – barriers to leisure in later life, leisure and retirement, leisure, aging, and place, leisure and technology in later life, and leisure and social connections in later life), organize and synthesize the information that you collected from your interviewee. Within each subsection, describe what you talked about in that particular interview, making sure to include the perspectives and experiences related to the topic area that the participant conveyed. Try to be as specific with this content and, where possible, incorporate stories, observations, or specific quotes (if applicable) that your interviewee shared Finally, in each subsection, compare and/or contrast the perspectives and experiences of your interviewee about the topic area to what can be found in the literature (e.g., research articles, books, newspaper articles, news stories, etc.). Your interviewee may have had more to say about one topic and less to say about another, so it is perfectly fine if some of these subsections are closer to 3 pages and others are closer to four.

Conclusion (1/2 page)

In your conclusion, offer a brief synopsis of what you took away from your five interviews with your interviewee. In this section you may also choose to discuss some leisure-related areas that your interviewee expressed interest in learning more about. This information will be useful for your subsequent Leisure Services/Resource Planning Assignment in this course.

References

In this assignment, you will be required to include a minimum of 15 references which can be drawn from different types of sources (e.g., articles, book chapters, news articles, blog posts). Up to ten of these references may be drawn from course readings; however, the remaining five must be gathered from an independent literature search by you. In-text citations, as well as a complete reference list must also be included with your paper. All referencing must follow APA (7th Edition) formatting requirements.

you should be approaching this assignment and where grades will be allocated. This rubric will

st be posted by February 1 .

Assignment Submission Checklist

Please make sure to submit all of the following:

☐ Signed participant consent form

☐ Signed Oath of Confidentiality

☐ 15 to 20-page interview paper (excluding bibliography)

☐ Completed Interview Time Log with five entries

☐ Five interview guides (one for each interview) containing five to eight questions each

☐ Interviewee response notes for each of the five interviews (point form notes are fine)

7