Well it has been a long time, I've been so preoccupied with getting my interviews done that I totally forgot about my blog!
Getting musicians organised seems to be a bit of a nightmare... I originally wanted to hold a focus group with about ten or my peers but after finding out that a few were touring and others had clashing schedules I have changed tack to using Skype to interview at my participants' convenience. Participation has still dropped a little, as I gave myself a two week period to carry out the interview. However, I still have six good quality interviews with a lot of information to collate.
I had my reservations about the inquiry up to the point of holding the interviews, as I wasn't sure how to digest the information and was even less sure that I would find patterns and trends in the results. Having run five of the six interviews so far I can happily say that this is not the case, I am actually looking forward to presenting my results and I have decided on a suitably styled artefact in the form of a website containing my findings.
I had a bit of an epiphany a the start of the term, as I wasn't sure if I should be changing my ethics form to allow for one of the focus group venues to be in a school. I wasn't sure if I should be approaching the school for permission to interview their peripatetic teachers on site. One of the other students stated a point which now seems quite straight forward but for some reason was not on my radar; If you are interviewing peripatetic teachers as professional musicians you could interview them outside of the school environment and save having to redo all the paperwork. Just goes to show how easy it can be to almost give yourself tunnel vision and miss a straightforward way around a particular problem!
