Interview Paper

Memo to: Dr. Messerli

From: Thanh Do

Re:  Interview Paper

Date: February 21st, 2017

Interviews are one of the most common and most useful ways of gathering information (Mayo, 2014).  The first reason is that interviews provide a depth of information and an opportunity to ask more detailed questions that is not possible in a structured questionnaire (Mayo, 2014). Interviewing someone face to face helps researchers read their body language and gain deeper insights into their thoughts and responses to questions (Mayo, 2014). Interviewers have more opportunity to follow up and make comments about what interviewees were talking about, which helps the interviewer not only develop a real dialogue on a particular issue but also check on the information that is not clear. Lastly, the interviewer’s expression of interest often encourages individuals to talk more.

I actually took a few years to find that tourism is my passion. But, after knowing my passion I one more time felt lost because tourism has many different areas and each offers unique experiences. I have talked to many tourism professionals working in different sectors such as hospitality, sustainable destinations, and conferences and events management, which helped me a lot in identifying my interests. Now, I know that hospitality and sustainable tourism development are the two careers that I will be totally devoted to. However, I am more passionate about the sustainable tourism development career and I want to hear deeper insights as well as experience from experts. That is why I thought about my previous Ecuadorian classmate, Carla Portalanza who has so much great experience in the field.  Since we are good friends, I called her to kindly ask if she would agree to allow me to conduct an interview with her. I also told her that the interview was not only for the school assignment, but more importantly I am really interested in what she is doing. She agreed right away, and then we set the schedule and had the interview at her office.

Carla Portalanza is currently working at the Embassy of Ecuador as a Cultural and Press Attaché where she constantly expresses her Ecuadorian roots to the American people. She has a wide range of experience from marketing to public relations for the promotion of tourism destinations. As an Ecuadorian representative, she is also responsible for creating tourism strategies such as cultural events to promote her country. She is one of the most passionate, open-minded and knowledgeable people I have known. She is fully committed to everything she is doing, which really motivates and inspires me.

The interview took place in nearly one hour and it went amazing. I did not plan to interview her that long because she was quite busy with her job, but she was very passionate in sharing her experience with me. I carefully prepared a list of ten questions and we covered all of them, which was absolutely wonderful. I used different types of questions to engage with her answers. Filter questions were used to get deep and wide range of information about the job she is doing, for example, asking her experience in specific areas that she has been doing such as marketing and promoting the Ecuador tourism (Mayo, 2014). Prompting questions were used to encourage her to talk more and support her desire to answer questions that I was asking, for instance, “tell me more about the difficulties you had with those projects” (Mayo, 2014). Probing questions were to follow up on something to find out more information or pursue a topic that she opened and did not finish such as “ Can you explain that more fully?” (Mayo, 2014). Those three types of questions were very powerful in helping me collect more information from the interviewee.