To find people who are in the Armed Forces I posted on Facebook requesting people who are in/have been in the Armed Forces or who knows somebody how is/was to come forward, if they are willing to take part.
This was great the responses I got from people, and resulted in the younger people who I ended up interviewing being found. Using Facebook as the platform for this friends were also able to tag their friends in the post, so I wasn’t just reaching my own friends pool, but 2nd and 3rd friend connections too.
The next stage was to ask friends directly who I knew were in the Armed Forces, or who I knew had relatives who were/are in the Armed Forces. This resulted in the largest amount of successful responses, as a friends relative had a large amount of contacts who have been in the Armed Forces and who were all really willing to answer my questions. This did mean that they were all of similar age ranges however, although resulted in one of the two females included in the publication which was really great to represent women.
The questions I wanted to ask were put together in a word document with individual titles (those who had been on tours and those for reservists), to ensure it was really clear what the different types of questions were. Included at the front of this document was a page about why I am asking these questions, what I am wanting to find out, and how I will be using their responses, so that those who were responding were completely clear about what was going to be happening to their responses, and how they were going to be used. This was also to give me something to back myself up on if in the future one of the respondents wasn’t happy with the publication I produced, or claimed they weren’t aware of what they were agreeing to.
In Person Interviews
Two of the interviews included in the publication were conducted in person. This would of ideally been how at least half of the interviews were conducted, however global positioning and time and travel constraints meant this wasn’t feasible.
The in person interviews contained the same set as questions as the emailed interviews. However, being in person these led to move of a conversation as opposed to quick fire question and answers, which resulted in more specific, detailed questions being asked and a more detailed and thorough response.
The interviews were recorded (asking permission beforehand) to ensure I could pay full attention to what the person was saying, without getting distracted making notes. This also ensured no pieces of information were missed, and allowed for an article to be much more easily written, as I had all the information rather than just key words and phrases and snippets. This also allowed for more natural conversation, without having to stop to write notes.
However, the downside of recording these interviews was that they then had to be transcribed, and each being about 30 minutes long, this took roughly 5-6 hours each to transcribe, which is a lengthy and tiring process.
Email/Facebook Interviews
The majority of the responses received were conducted via email, and two of the responses were via Facebook messenger.
Although this resulted in a Q & A style response, the responses received answered the questions very directly, and were often much more succinct and information packed as opposed to in conversational there is a lot of waffling to get to your point. This resulted in a much more punchier response, however one with generally less detail.
To get responses, the document with the explanations and questions was emailed to those willing to participate so that they could answer the questions directly on the document and email it back to me. This provided a simple method of sending out the questions and ensured the answers received back were all in the same format, making it easy to translate them into a publication.
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