Continuing 6a) and 6b) ......

l  Pilot Interview

One of the other inquiry tools that I decided to pilot was an interview as it is one of the tools that I am thinking of using in my inquiry. To prepare for my interview, I began to decide what type of structure to use and where would it work best for doing this interview... Then, after consulting the reader and considering the availability and convenience for both my participant and myself I decided to use face to face interview.

The person I conducted for my interview was not from my survey group; it was from an ex-classmate who I did the same makeup course with and she is now working for a makeup agent and has her own business in Hong Kong. I used a semi-structured, it was flexible, allowing new questions to be brought up during the interview as a result to aiding my line of inquiry. The areas of discussion focused on were: How does a makeup artist become professional? How to ensure to work successfully in such a competitive industry? So I was looking for information and advices from her who has been working for a couple of years in the industry and running her own freelance business, and from the same professional community.

Merits:

I started the interview by asking the participant what her views was on the topic and what impact this had had on her career development. For me this worked well as it allowed the participant to talk freely about their feelings on the topic and how it has affected her. In addition, I also gathered some other useful information and advices from her as this was the chance for the participant to also bring into the interview new ideas and questions, which I had not put in my interview but were useful to aiding my line of inquiry.

Limits:

On the other hand, one of the downsides was that I found conducting an individual/private structured interview was not so broad… although it allowed free discussion and the chance for the participant to raise her own views and questions, in some ways it limited the breadth of the interview. The process took a lot more time than the survey such as spending more time to adjust time/convenience to conduct the interview and I only had one person’s answers at the end compared to a large number of responses after the survey. I think that it would be good to interview people that have taken the survey as well because after conducting my pilot survey I found myself wanting to speak to people who took part in the survey and discuss their answers further. Moreover, I also found it was hard to maintain professionalism while talking with my friend on face to face especially we have been a while not seen each other as she works abroad , so we were easily slip chatting personal things beside my questions and had to steer the conversation back to my topic.