Presidential Election Observation Essay

What people say they believe and say that they do are often contradicted by their behavior. Given the frequency of this human inconsistency, observation can be a way to check what people report about themselves during interviews. Having the opportunity to make an observation alone or by both observing and participating in this and the last assignment has given me the opportunity to see differences between these two qualitative methods. Overall, I found interesting this assignment because I was able to interview for an hour a master’s student and talk about my research subject which is predicated on the presidential election 2016, a topic that somehow affects even those that do not follow politics or simply aren’t interested. One day before conducting the interview I took a few hours to prepare for it, I read a lot of research articles on the media and its influence on previous presidential elections. I also watched documentaries on the first presidential debate that was televised which was between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, and I prepared some basic
The only notes I took when interviewing the master’s student was based on his/her facial expressions and the way she was reacting when responding to my questions, the reason why I only took notes about the participants’ reactions (facial expressions) was because I was too focused on what was going to be my next question. One thing I noticed was that when the participant spoke, he/she would often overuse the filler “um” at times it would get distracting while interviewing because it would mess up the structure of the participant’s sentence, causing me to try and repeat what they said and sort of clarify the point being