I’ve only conducted one other interview in graduate school. Although I think I did a great job with the interview itself, I was trying to shoehorn a lot into a theory class whose scope should have been much more precise. This is part of why I don’t think I’m good at theory. I can’t focus my observations tightly enough to fit into a single, narrow framework.

I’m good at brainstorming and at coming up with questions. The trick is to come up with fewer core questions and just build from there with furthering questions. I already knew what I wanted to ask when drafting potential questions, I just made sure to include them in the exercise.

Upon further reflection, I’m realizing that the trouble with my previous interview was that I conducted an inductive interview for a deductive class. We were supposed to enter with a theory in mind and find it in the participant’s life, but I was far more interested in the participant’s gendering than their interface with Weberian stratification.

Fortunately, I had a wealth of participants to select from this time, and a more focused topic. Most Millennials have learned from the Internet “Spoon Theory”, an amateur theory depicting life with an invisible chronic disability in terms of how many “spoons” the person gets per day to carry out tasks; from its ubiquity, I have started to suspect that the Spoonie Generation is also a Caregiver Generation. And indeed, most of the Millennial caregivers I have known have, themselves, received care already at some point in their lives.