Please exercise consideration of your informants' privacy by not publishing any details that would reveal their identities without their permission. Potential interviewees could include your mother or other relatives, neighbors, friends, etc - anyone you know that would be willing to answer questions about their experience of pregnancy and birth. You could (maybe should?) include one interview with someone who witnessed pregnancy & birth closely (eg. a dad or partner) but the rest of the interviews should explore the experience of someone who personally experienced these situations (i.e. the birth-mother). Also, make sure that at least some of the interviews happen in person so that you can experience the emotional transformations involved. If you try to interview a pregnant lady or lady with a newborn on the subway (which might be fun) do it carefully and extra-politely!
Please preface your interviews (which could be recorded in notebooks or using audio or video) with a guarantee of privacy regarding identity. Remember to keep your questions respectful, open-ended, and non-pushy. At the end of the interview please offer your blog address and email/phone # so that your informants can see what you've written and follow up with clarifications or requests.
A few questions to spark your interviews - please make up your own, of course, in addition to any of these that you choose to use;
1. How did pregnancy affect you physically, emotionally, or in other ways?
2. What did you do, while pregnant, to prepare for giving birth?
3. What actions and attitudes by specific other people made your pregnancy and birth more joyous? More challenging?
4. What thoughts and feelings influenced your choice to make a baby?
5. What feelings come back to you when you remember labor and giving birth?
ETC.
For each of the 3-5 stories you collect write up;
1. A narrative paragraph or three of particularly interesting, informative, or insightful elements of the pregnancy/birth experience (what happened, how it felt, thoughts & perspectives of the interviewee, etc) along with a;
2. A paragraph more or less of analysis (from your perspective) of how that story fits in with and informs your understanding, questions, exploration of pregnancy & birth in our culture.
3. At the end of your post, please include a single 1-2 sentence description of a topic/question/issue that you feel inspired to explore as a result of learning these stories in bold.
Due Monday, Feb. 28th at 8:30am.
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