Interview people with unique knowledge of your subject. When considering whether an interview makes sense for your project, ask yourself this important question: “What do I expect to learn from the interviewee?” If the information you seek is easily available online or in print, don’t waste everyone’s time going through with an interview. If, on the other hand, this person offers a fresh perspective on your topic, a personal interview could advance your research.

Interviews can be written or spoken. Written interviews, whether by e-mail or letter, instant messaging or online chat, allow you to keep questions and answers focused and provide a written record of the interviewee’s responses. But spoken interviews, both in person and via Skype, allow in-depth discussion of a topic and may lead to more memorable reactions and deeper insights. Be flexible in setting up the type of interview most convenient for your subject. For oral interviews, keep the following suggestions in mind:

For an interview conducted in person, arrive at the predetermined meeting place on time and dressed professionally. If you wish to record the interview, be sure to ask permission first.

If you conduct your interview in writing, request a response by a certain date — one or two weeks is reasonable for ten questions. Refer to Chapter 13 for e-mail etiquette and Chapter 14 for guidelines on writing business letters.

For telephone interviews, call from a place with good reception, where you will not be interrupted. Your cell phone should be fully charged or plugged in.

Make careful and verifiable observations. The point of systematic observation is to provide a reliable way of studying a narrowly defined activity or phenomenon. But in preparing reports or arguments that focus on small groups or local communities, you might find yourself without enough data to move your claims beyond mere opinion.

For example, an anecdote or two won’t persuade administrators that community rooms in the student union are being scheduled inefficiently. But you could conduct a simple study of these facilities, showing exactly how many student groups use them and for what purposes, over a given period of time.

This kind of evidence usually carries more weight with readers, who can decide whether to accept or challenge your numbers.

Some situations can’t be counted or measured as readily as the one described above. If you wanted, let’s say, to compare the various community rooms to determine whether those with windows encouraged more productive discussions than rooms without, your observations would be “softer” and more qualitative. You might have to describe the tone of speakers’ voices or the general mood of the room. But numbers might play a part; you could, for instance, track how many people participated in the discussion or the number of tasks accomplished during the meeting.

To avoid bias in their observations, many researchers use double-column notebooks. In the first column, they record the physical details of their observation as objectively as possible — descriptions, sounds, countable data, weather, time, circumstances, activity, and so on. In the second column, they record their interpretations and commentaries on the data.

In addition to careful and objective note-taking techniques, devices such as cameras, video recorders, and tape recorders provide reliable backup evidence about an event. Also, having more than one witness observe a situation can help verify your findings.

Learn more about fieldwork. In those disciplines or college majors that use fieldwork, you will find guides or manuals to explain the details of such research procedures. You will also discover that fieldwork comes in many varieties, from naturalist observations and case studies to time studies and market research.

A double-column notebook entry.